Formed when Berries Blue duo Marlene Enright and Pat Carey enlisted friends from the Cork scene to lend their new songs more weight, The Hard Ground have spent the past year working on this pristine set. As it suggests on the tin, Broken Conversations assembles ten vignettes based on the kind of dialogues of love and strife that you’ll hear in locals across the land. It’s a concept that proves fruitful, giving The Hard Ground’s reupholstered, immaculately played folk a real sense of direction and intent. ‘Pawn’ leads the charge and will remain their calling card for some time, an intoxicating meld of affecting strings and electric guitar stabs possessing a tune that simply must be heard on the radio. If nothing else here quite matches it, there’s plenty of other bright spots. ‘Dance Of A Lady’ is alluringly hushed, ‘Reckless’ is a beautiful, autumnal lament. The last third rather trails off but the deployment of brass and strings shows ambition, the band sound genuinely at ease with their instruments and each other, and evidence of strong songwriting abounds in the contrasting approaches of Enright and Carey. With Broken Conversations, The Hard Ground have laid robust foundations for the future.