DANI LARKIN - Next Of Kin

An unconventional narrative, an uneasy goth-folk transmutation where life and death run along the same track: Dani Larkin is yet another Irish voice telling stories of torment and ecstasy, a journey through the dark weave of maturity and self-awareness.

“Next Of Kin” is her second album, a collection of songs that is at times abrasive and even disturbing (“I Wake”), often marked by instrumental dissonances that give rise to unusual chromatic tonalities – the kind that, right from the album’s opening notes, reinvent the Christian hymn “Morning As Broken”, written by Eleanor Farjeon in 1931 and made famous in the version by Cat Stevens, a track that Dani Larkin strips bare both in its title, “Morning”, and in its melody, rendering it almost unrecognisable and unsettling.

With hallucinated visionary force, Dani Larkin’s voice descends into the guts of another classic, “She Moved Through The Fair”, letting the familiar melodic line flow over an anguished vocal delivery and skeletal, archaic guitar chords.

The album is conceived as a journey through adulthood and the emotional and spiritual connections that define it: feelings such as fear, courage and love alternate in a narrative with literary and cinematic, often tortuous, contours.

Rather than indulging the listener, “Next Of Kin” unsettles them, taking them by the hand into familiar sonic territory (the bucolic, angelic folk of “To Be Enough” and the lofty romanticism of “Caledonia”), yet it can just as easily turn deceptive and dark, forever caught between present (“David”) and past (“Love+ Liberation”), ready to cut everything short with the weary, mournful farewell of “Danny Boy”, the gripping finale of a story with neither winners nor losers.

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22/03/2026