JOSHUA BURNSIDE - It’s Not Going To Be Okay

He's a fine poet and a skilled storyteller, Joshua Burnside, the Irish singer-songwriter who stirred up the waters of contemporary folk with the restless album “Teeth Of Time”, roughing up electro-acoustic landscapes with harsh drone-music manipulations and creative hybrids built from banjo and violin, glitch and noise. “It’s Not Going To Be Okay” arrives just one year after “Teeth Of TIme” and changes the game entirely, embracing a minimal aesthetic that leaves the words and the intensity of the compositions to carry a visceral power oozing with pain. Dedicated to his friend and fellow musician Dean Jendoubi, who died in 2024 at the age of 35, Burnside's new album is a diary in which the author lays bare feelings that are as personal as they are universal.

That these ten songs were connected wasn't immediately obvious - it was only when the musician wrote the title track that he realized pain, suffering and death were recurring themes in his latest compositions; sharing them onstage and engaging with his audience gave him the definitive key to the project.

As explicit as they are in venting deep sadness, the songs don't wallow in melancholy: Joshua Burnside broadens the concept of loss and suffering by focusing on that moment when pain debilitates the body and makes it sluggish, and the melodic frame that serves as a backdrop is at times almost tender ("Moon High"). There's even irony in the seemingly carefree "Good Times Are Comin'," a disorienting sonic and lyrical digression where the author plays with contrasts both musical (as dark as it is foolish) and lyrical (a comatose state as refuge from pain), and it's here that his declared passion for Books is most evident.

Stripping the arrangements down to the bone was undoubtedly an interesting choice, but laying the songs bare exposes discrepancies in inspiration that might lead many to dismiss them too hastily ("The Last Armchair"). The sharp noir humor of "Something Else" and the emotional intensity of "With You" are small gems on a record that could be seen as the Irish musician's own "Nebraska," a deliberately less striking record than "Teeth Of Time" before it, but every bit as worthwhile.

I've deliberately saved the two most poignant songs on the record for last: the searing title track, which shows just how overwhelming Joshua Burnside's power can be when he steps outside the boundaries of folk, and the harrowing "Remake," where the pain becomes so palpable it's breathtaking, the chords stripped to the bare minimum and the words ringing out like a final eulogy, right before the definitive realization of absence, of suffering.

Well, I wrote the guestbook, or the book of the dead, I love you and I left it like that. Hey, I'm getting pretty good at this now, some old friends you hadn't spoken to in ten years were chatting away, so I took my pint outside, where some lads were messing about. And then I thought of us, of a cool wind blowing through our hair, watching the merchant ships go by, with the sun in our eyes and our backs on the grass, and I thought of something you once said, wandering through the woods out of our minds: it's all just a remake, nothing new. Maybe next time you'll play me. And I'll get to play you, and I'll get to play you.

("Remake")

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26/05/2026