Ships by Seamus Fogarty

A pulsing, lushly-layered requiem for a lost friend and the October bleakness of the County Mayo countryside, ‘I Passed Your House’ is the first single to be taken from London-based Irish folk and electronica-mashing singer-songwriter Seamus Fogarty’s wonderful new album Ships, which will be released on limited-edition 12” coloured vinyl, CD and digital services on March 6, 2026. Seamus’s first new collection of music since 2023’s Hee Haw EP (featuring the BBC 6Music / Cillian Murphy acclaimed single ‘They Recognised Him’), Ships is his most expansive and uplifting collection of music to date. Channelling everything from Tortoise to early 90s hip hop, it’s packed with poignant and funny slice-of-life vignettes touching on love, loss, DIY coffins, cans on trains with strangers and so much more.

Written in the wake of his last album, 2020’s A Bag Of Eyes, and road-tested while on tour with Lisa O’Neill around Ireland and the UK, the enthusiastic response of audiences to his new compositions convinced Seamus to enlist the help of a range of esteemed collaborators, old and new, to bring this latest collection of songs to life. Recorded at studios in London, St Leonards-on-Sea and Margate and fine-tuned in his own home studio in Walthamstow, the list of collaborators includes string-arranger and multi-instrumentalist Emma Smith (Pulp, Beth Gibbons), drummers Chris Vatalaro (Anohni, Radiohead) and Aram Zarikian (Grasscut), and horns player Joe Auckland (Madness, Oasis), Additional production and engineering comes from by Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins) and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump). Abrahams also mixed the album.

Seamus’s new album Ships begins with ‘Come Down To The Square’, an urbanite distant cousin of his earliest pastoral songs, rooted not in found sounds from the Irish countryside, but the babble and buzz of central Walthamstow, complete with God-fearing street preachers and impassioned stall holders, all set to a backdrop of droning synth and chiming banjo. Motorik-folk fusion ‘Fire’ revisits a clutch of old verses found buried in a phone and dismissed in the moment for being “too simple and honest” before being reignited by an unlikely combination of instruments from Moog synthesiser to tin whistle, masterfully turning something that “started out a bit introspective,” says Seamus, “into something quietly inspirational”. The album’s title track and emotional centrepiece ‘Ships’ takes its unabashedly romantic chorus from a Tracy Emin neon artwork on Margate harbour, and sails on a breeze of sweeping, delicately detailed progressive pop worthy of prime Brian Wilson.

A dolorously funny spoken word lament set to queasily de-tuned guitar chords and wheezing synths (and Cillian Murphy’s favourite Seamus Fogarty song) ‘They Recognised Him’ previously appeared on the Hee Haw EP, and reappears here in remastered form (by Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios). The woozy, waltzing ‘Woking’ takes in a range of disparate influences from 19th century Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov to communal can-drinking on trains with elderly strangers and might just be the strangest song ever written about the Surrey town on the Southwestern Main Line. ‘The Last Days of Watchmaker Joe’, inspired by the curious story of a man who built his own coffin using no nails nor screws, is set to the ominous backdrop of Aram Zarikian’s relentless rhythms, Emma Smith’s squealing violas and Fogarty’s own guttural howling. “I really needed to get that out of me,” Seamus admits, “I’m much calmer since.” Of the final track, the album’s glorious crescendo ‘Doer Undoer’, he says: “I kind of wanted it to be a two-fingers to the doubters and to the doubt inside of myself.”

“I think there’s a few miserable songs on there for sure – obligatory at this stage,” says Seamus, “but to my mind there’s something strangely uplifting about this collection, more so than anything I’ve released before. I know I have it better than most people but I still find it hard to persevere and keep going and that’s probably the main theme of the album. It’s honest in a way that my other albums haven’t always been, which is why I’m so sure it’s going to be a massive hit.”

DIY label, run by Pictish Trail, from his caravan on the Isle of Eigg, Scotland.