Track of the Day: Sinead O'Brien - 'Like Culture'

Limerick native Sinead O'Brien has unveiled the dramatic new video for her latest single, 'Like Culture'.

The track follows the release of recent singles 'Multitudes', 'There Are Good Times Coming' and 'Holy Country' from her powerful debut album Time Bend And Break The Bower - out on June 10th via Chess Club Records.

The music was curated by Sinead O’Brien alongside drummer and guitarist Julian Hanson and Oscar Robertson, and produced by Dan Carey. Sarah Piantadosi from ArtistryLondon directed the video for the Irish artist's latest album cut.

'Like Culture' snaps onto our screens with Sinead in signature black leather trench coat and dark sunglasses performing on stage, with flashing lights and interspersed visuals of sensual bodies uniting.

"The room has absorbed us/Eaten our bodies and consumed our minds/Fallen to our knees/Lost the need to need/Everything normal/Everything becomes normal," she croons, her gripping lyrics working to enchant the listener over a compellingly catchy guitar riff. "The street has absorbed us.Taken the form away/Everything normal," she adds before telling us to dance.

Nightlife and specifically the dancefloor can act as powerful microcosms for human expression and development, as the designer and poet declares in the song.

“'Like Culture' is part memory, part experience but it’s never nostalgic," Sinead explains. "I worked from memory, splicing and intercutting it with scenes or mantras from my present. I look ahead and behind, banging the two together. Part of this stems from a poem I wrote in Paris in 2012 called 'Limerick, slightly with you'. It’s a coming-of-age story where there’s this rising tension, a disquiet beginning to bubble; the wars of youth. And once that started - it never stopped.

"You realise you’re never done looking, growing. The dance floor as a space and an image imprinted on me; the significance it holds for the individual, the group and culture," O'Brien adds. "I wanted to create a really gritty piece where the dance floor and nightlife come as the saving response to that panicky call of youth. You feel the urge to live emotionally, the need to seek connection, contact. 'Growing together, like culture'; Under compression and circumstance, things merge, grow and cultivate. But it’s also about who you become in that setting, how that unfolds.”

A brand new interview with the performer will feature in our upcoming issue, stay tuned.

Check out Sinead O'Brien's tour dates below.

12 June - St Anne's Park, Dublin (w Duran Duran)
17-19 June - Body & Soul, Ballinlough Castle, Ireland
29-31 July - All Together Now, Co Waterford
26 October - Cyprus Avenue, Cork
27 October - Whelans, Dublin
28 October - Black Box, Belfast
29 October - Dolans Warehouse, Limerick