This October, the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection got a live preview of, what is thus far, our favorite album of 2026, when Ailbhe Reddy opened MilkBoy for Will Varley, her final show of 2025. The performance featured solo acoustic renditions of a handful of tracks from KISS BIG, the Dublin-born, New York-based singer/songwriter’s third full-length and first for Don Giovanni Records, which drops on January 30th. The album – written between Dublin, London, New York, and the American Midwest – is a breakup record that blends the kinds of acoustic folk and synth-driven electronic sounds that Reddy grew up loving. Over Thanksgiving break, I got a chance to chat with Ailbhe via Zoom about 2025 and her most carefully calculated sounds yet.
*Interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Cihak: Thanks so much for having me out to the MilkBoy show!
Ailbhe Reddy: I appreciate it! It was my first-ever show in Philadelphia, my first time in Philadelphia, actually!
Izzy: What’d you think about it in general?
Ailbhe: I loved it! I was with a friend; we came down on Amtrak from New York. She’s been a bunch, so we went to a few places that she knew and just hung out for the day. I’ve played with Will like a million times, so it was cool to hang out with him, as well.
Izzy: Yeah, I didn’t realize that until you were talking about it onstage.
Ailbhe: Yeah! We toured together in 2018, and it was the most extensive touring I’d ever done. He was amazing, and so encouraging, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. When he’s been in and out of New York in the last couple of years, we’ve hung out, and I saw he was doing a few shows, and was like, “Can I hop on for one or two?”
Izzy: I wanna talk about your 2025, so before I get into specifics, what have been some of your personal highlights or milestones of the year?
Ailbhe: I guess just starting to actually release this album, which I’ve been working on for a while now… starting to work with Don Giovanni, who are a Philadelphia-based label… doing SXSW for the second time… that was kind of how I started the year. It’s been a quiet year on the gig-front, but the ones I’ve done have been really intentional and had a really nice energy.
I got to do a few shows where I played the full album, which is a really cool and interesting way to do it. We did two shows at the end of 2024 where we played the album from start to finish, and then a few old songs, in really small venues in London and Dublin. That was a nice way to test it. I feel like every other time I’ve released music it’s been figuring it out live; this has been more like having the album, but figuring out stuff about the songs through playing it live, which has been an interesting process.
Izzy: You mentioned Don Giovanni Records, which is such an amazing label. How has it been working with them and being a part of that roster?
Ailbhe: Totally historically awesome roster! Joe [Steinhardt], who heads the label, is a really cool guy and a really interesting person to work with and learn from. Everyone I’ve ever released anything through has been UK-based, so it’s nice to do something in The States. I feel like there’s a real DIY scene over here that I’m really vibing off of for next year. We have a few things planned that I’m excited to do.
Izzy: How did you connect with Don Giovanni?
Ailbhe: Joe had heard my music, and when I’d finished this album, we were shipping it around to a few different labels, and he was just like, “I’m in!” I’d just come out of another label, and I did not find the experience of working with a bigger label that great. I’m sure that’s not shocking anyone, I feel like every single person says that [laughs]. I thought it was really nice that he was so upfront and interested, and not playing any kind of game, just like, “I think we could do something with this! I think it’ll be really good! I want to work together!” And I just loved that!
Izzy: I’ve heard similar stories with him and other artists on the label.
Ailbhe: It’s incredibly refreshing!
Izzy: On that note, do you have any favorite labelmates, whether past or present, who’ve dropped stuff with the label?
Ailbhe: I mean, obviously Screaming Females are awesome, and I know that he did stuff with Waxahatchee, and they’re all awesome people to in any way be tangentially associated with [laughs].
Izzy: How do you feel like the album compares to previous releases? I know it covers a pretty broad spectrum of sentiments and was also written across a number of different places.
Ailbhe: When I was writing it, I had just come off the back of releasing another album that I felt was really pointedly indie rock, and I wanted to do something like the music that I listened to in my teens, because I was listening to other music again.
It was the first album I’ve done where I wasn’t listening to anything that was being put out at the time. I was like, “I want this to sound a particular way,” so it wasn’t taking in any influences from anything being dropped at the time, which I think is something I’ve failed to do in the past, and something that I can hear when I listen back to other things that I’ve released… There’s nothing wrong with that, it happens to everybody, but it was the first record where I just went into a little hole and was like, “This is the exact sound!”
I’ve been working on a lot of the sounds for a while — a lot of the synth sounds that are in “Align” and “That Girl” and “Graceful Swimmer” — that were ideas of this analogue synth sound that mixes the folk acoustic guitars and acoustic kits and everything with a more electronic sound. That was really intentional.
Izzy: You mentioned that at the show, that some of the songs were like filled with synths normally, which was interesting, because you wouldn’t know [laughs].
Ailbhe: Yeah! I’m a firm believer that a song isn’t good enough to be on an album if you can’t just play it on an acoustic guitar!
Izzy: On that note, have you had any favorite reactions to the new music so far? You’ve dropped a few singles, and you have been playing the songs… I didn’t realize that you’ve actually played the full album live already…
Ailbhe: The reactions are always really interesting. You always have a preconceived idea of what people will like, and you’re always wrong [laughs]. The song which ended up being the title of the album is one that I never really intended to have on the record. It was just meant to be a sweet song that I wrote for my partner, and then I was playing in Paris, and my keyboard wasn’t working, so I was like, “I need to pull something else out of the bag,” and I’m so bad at remembering what songs I actually know [laughs], so I was like, “This one’s fresh in my head, so I’ll just play it,” and people loved it.
There was a real reaction from the audience in a way that you don’t always get when you play something for the first time live. People afterwards were like, “Oh my god, I loved that song that you played at the end!” or “It made me cry,” and I was like, “Okay, this song has legs that I never realized!” If my keyboard hadn’t failed, that song might not have made the album, and definitely wouldn’t have ended up being the title…
The album’s about accepting and being optimistic about the fact that every time you go through a breakup, you know there’s something else down the line and that you will love again, even if you go through a period of being a bit negative about it all [laughs]. It’s about grabbing those feelings and leaning into them… I was worried about the title being overly romantic, but, for me, it feels like kind of a carpe diem thing.
Izzy: I just realized that your debut LP, Personal History, just turned five, so I’m curious how you feel about that album now, half-a-decade on?
Ailbhe: Oh my god, half-a-decade! We were just talking about this! I always say, “half-a-decade,” instead of, “five years.” It just sounds bit more grand, and I love it [laughs]! It doesn’t feel that long ago. I like that record. I still play “Personal History” and “Looking Happy” and a few of those songs at like every gig, but then there’s other songs that I don’t play ever, that I hear every once in a while on the radio or whatever, and it doesn’t sound like me anymore. Every time an album is released, you think, “She just did that,” but I recorded it in 2018 and 2019.
Izzy: And sometimes the songs were written even quite a bit before that…
Ailbhe: Oh, way before that, like 2016/2017. That’s why it’s called Personal History, it’s basically like, “Here’s me up until now!” It’s like finding an old journal entry, and being like, “I can’t believe I wrote this!” It’s so weird, because you’d think you’d remember these things because you wrote them, you played them loads of times, and then you went to a studio and recorded them… and yet, you hear them and you’re like, “Who’s that girl?”
Izzy: And it’s funny because I feel like a lot of the time the first album is like the fan favorite, but for the artist, a lot of times, seems the most detached.
Ailbhe: I suppose that’s why, it’s like you have cut out all of the extras. I feel like I cut out lots of extras with this one, because I was working on it for so long.
Izzy: Do you like having a long time to work on something? How does that kind of alter it?
Ailbhe: Because you keep questioning it. Sometimes it’s good; I definitely made some choices because I was sitting on it for a while. There were certain choices that I made because I’d been listening to the album loads and I got bored and was like, “Maybe this needs to happen…,” so we put this extra stuff in. I try to give myself like five months without listening to it at all, which you don’t have the privilege of doing if you’re trying to get it out fast, when you’re on a label and they want you to do three albums or something. I listened back to one or two of the songs, and was like, “Woah, take all that extra shit out!” [laughs]. But, as you get bored with it, you hear it again with fresh ears. You can kind of lose sight of it and then gain sight of it anew, because you get so lost in the sauce when you’re in the studio.
Izzy: Not to detract from your own music, but have you had any favorite music of 2025, in addition to your own?
Ailbhe: Yeah! I loved the CMAT record! Her stuff has always been amazing, but the most recent album had a few touches showing what a great songwriter she is, and touching on more really heartbreaking material, as well. I obviously love the new Lily Allen record. It was an unexpected one that just dropped on a Friday and has been taking over my mind ever since. Those are two albums this year that I felt like a fangirl over [laughs], and I very rarely feel that about stuff. I’m normally kind of on the outside of those things, like “Yeh… it’s pretty good…” But I love those two.
Izzy: Finally, I know that you have a handful of dates in the UK and Ireland already scheduled for spring but, in addition to that, what are you hoping and planning for 2026, after the new album drops… that you can talk about?
Ailbhe: We’ll be doing some shows Stateside, as well. It’s all in the making at the moment!
