Sorcha Richardson

Sorcha Richardson’s debut album ‘First Prize Bravery’ was the culmination of her experiences throughout young adulthood, a time during which she ventured from home in Dublin to New York, Los Angeles and then back again. Greeted by critical acclaim from Nylon, The Irish Times, DIY and more, comparisons were made with Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers et al, leading to a nomination for the Choice Music Prize. She toured the UK and Ireland, hit a few festivals and then… well, we all know what threw a spanner in the works. Two years on, and she seems to have made peace with her misfortune - especially as she has friends who never got to fully tour their releases which emerged at a similar time. “In some ways I feel lucky that we at least got one lap around the track,” she evaluates, noting that her subsequent Irish headline tour was rescheduled so many times that the exact number has been lost to history. “It felt like it killed some of the momentum I had drummed up. But it also meant that I had all the time in the world to make my second record.” Instead, she moved into her late grandparents’ house, turned the living room into an impromptu if elementary studio, and delved into the “static process” of working alone, and then a month-long love/hate process of almost daily sessions via Zoom. Ironically, it was Sorcha’s time alone that kickstarted the process when she wrote ‘Jackpot’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Good Intentions’ and the standalone single ‘Starlight Lounge’ in quick succession. Having first come to attention by sharing a string of tracks, often just as soon as they were finished, Sorcha relished the opportunity to focus on creating a body of work.The result is her second album, ‘Smiling Like An Idiot’, which she says, focuses on what her life looked like over the course of those eighteen months. “It mostly tracks one specific relationship,” she says. “It’s about falling in love with a person and a place, which in this case is Dublin, and how those two are interlinked.” Thematically it highlights a pursuit of happiness and the full-blown intensity of new love, but gaining something so life-affirming comes with the fear that it could just as easily be swept away. “I started to think about things that accompany that intense euphoria. The deep anxiety that can sometimes go with it. That feeling you get when you’re on a rollercoaster, ascending - it’s exhilarating and terrifying. I think fear is a very big part of falling in love.” At first, Sorcha thought that her early demos were a little too persistently happy. The more she wrote, however, the more she discovered an inner tension, with subsequent songs often being informed by a nervous “undercurrent of anxiety.” She also pushed to expose some of those discomforting emotions too, leading to the album’s darker opening half with the “self-destructive impulses” and repetition of bad habits that inform ‘Stalemate’, ‘Shark Eyes’ and ‘Purgatory’. As she continues, those themes spiralled into thoughts of self-confidence and identity in new relationships. “When you let someone else into your life in a very intimate and vulnerable way, you learn new things about yourself: these are the parts of myself I know, these are the parts of myself I didn’t know, these are parts of myself I know are bad and I need to resist. I think in all new relationships, there’s so much uncertainty. There’s a need to take a leap of faith and ask someone to take a bet on you, or to take a bet on you when you’re not sure you would bet on yourself.” Yet the album’s first single ‘Archie’ signifies the first step in a gradual lightening of its mood. It’s a coming-of-age tale based upon friendship rather than love, and those big open road dreams of where that naive, teenage love of music may one day take you. It’s also symbolic of Sorcha’s disregard for genre expectations. What starts as dusky, desert folk suddenly takes on a grander, majestic elegance. “I was trying not to think too much about genre, so the references could be anything from Carole King to LCD Soundsystem.” Just as importantly, music and mood are inseparable. “The stakes in these songs feel high, these moments are so charged and magnetised, and I wanted the music to match that adrenaline.” Throughout, synths and guitars share near equal billing as do live and programmed drums. There are relatively linear moments, such as the hushed introspection of ‘525’ but the majority of their songs escape simple categorisation, whether it’s the splash of dejected disco that underpins ‘Shark Eyes’ or the late album highlight ‘Good Intentions’, which simultaneously feels like it’s on the outer boundaries of indie-rock, shoegaze and electro-pop. A key aspect of the album’s sound came from Sorcha’s realisation that if she had to work remotely with people, the time difference with her previous producer Alex Casnoff - based in LA - (Sparks, Dawes, Harriet) wouldn’t be an issue. He ended up working on eight of the album’s songs as the pair opened up a world of sonic possibilities by laying down drum machines and then building upwards, in whatever direction they saw fit. Elsewhere, Scorcha produced ‘525’ and ‘Holiday’ with co-production and engineering from David Curley, and sharing a production credit on ‘Jackpot’ with James Vincent McMorrow. The album’s journey comes to a close with the title track, a picture postcard of cherished memories, old friends and their favourite haunts in Dublin. And for all of Sorcha’s previous poetic turns-of-phrases, the album’s most unadorned line - “I never knew I could be so happy here”- is its heartbeat. The previous challenges have led from a sliding doors moment of fortuity to a place of contentment. Or as Sorcha says, “Something that felt like the end of the road was actually the beginning of a really important, happy time. Even if I couldn’t possibly have known that would be how it turned out.” And that’s the beautifully beguiling magic of ‘Smiling Like An Idiot’. It artfully articulates those moments in life that you don’t want to have to go through, but it emerges with the optimism that - somehow - things will work out for the best in time.