Niamh Regan isn’t one to rest on her laurels. Her 2020 debut album Hemet established the Galway singer-songwriter as an artist with an undeniable gift for memorable folk melodies. It made waves and led to nominations for both the RTÉ Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize.

With sophomore album Come As You Are about to arrive, Regan reflects on the good fortune of her music career.

“I didn’t think I’d be pursuing this full time, as I am now,” she muses. “Previously, I was preparing to be a teacher and had just married my husband. It’s miraculous, really. I was hoping for a quieter life.”

But life isn’t so quiet these days. A self-professed “small-scale artist”, Regan was unprepared for the widespread acclaim of Hemet.

“It was a big jump,” she recalls. “I felt I should’ve been happy, but I struggled an awful lot with that transition. I The second album helped me get over some of that, allowed me to grow up with it and stop overthinking so much. I feel more confident.”

Confidence underpins the approach on Come As You Are, with Regan sounding more self-assured than ever. The lyrics, meanwhile, are boldly tender and raw. As such, there’s more friction and tension than on Hemet.

“I wanted to achieve a more fully-fledged sound, while keeping the lyrics vulnerable,” notes Niamh. “I was going through all sorts of tough personal stuff, and I put all of it into the lyrics, which sometimes doesn’t suit a more ‘confident’ sound. But I wanted to find a way to blend those opposites.”

ANGRY SONG

To help facilitate her vision, Niamh reached out to a different producer, Tommy McLaughlin of Villagers, who’s worked with the likes of Bell X1, Rosie Carney and Lisa O’Neill. They eventually met up in Donegal at McLaughlin’s Attica Studios and set aside time to write and record the album.

“It was like jumping into the deep end with a stranger with half-baked songs and ideas,” Niamh recalls. “We had to comb through them and try to form a cohesive piece, which was an ordeal because there were so many demos. We’re both awfully quiet people, so the chemistry took time to sink in. Everything eventually clicked into gear and we locked heads on the third day. We both realised this was going to be something really great. All eleven songs were recorded live over a week.”

Niamh Regan. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Lyrically and sonically, Come As You Are is an interesting paradox: there’s an obvious departure from the last album, but it preserves the heart of Regan’s work.

“Tommy really got the idea,” Regan reflects, “that I wanted the sound to be a step up from my last album, while still maintaining that deeper part of me in it. You can absolutely hear whispers of my first album on the new one, but you can also glean where I’m going next. In that way, Come As You Are is a very confident stepping stone.”

The new record tackles several issues that loom large in the small hours for many of us: questions of self-doubt, uncertainty about your purpose in life, whether relationships are blossoming in the way you’d hoped, how to navigate a male-dominated industry, and determining priorities. As the singer fleshes out these matters over eleven tracks, an internal conflict becomes apparent.

“A key thing on this album is tension,” she says. “There’s a drone present on nearly every song. That was really important for me, because that sound captures that inner tension brewing. When I listen to the album, I don’t feel 100% comfortable and I want that.”

To this end, she traded comfort for a sort of candour in her songwriting.

“On Come As You Are, I went to the ‘depths of the well,’ as they say, to sing about what I found tough and jarring as a woman, and as a woman in music.”

Womanhood – and the experiences thereof – populates much of Come As You Are. On the opening ‘Madonna,’ Niamh charts the simmering rage and defiance of a woman scorned.

“‘Madonna’ is a very angry song,” she says. “It’s not that I’m the kind of person to harbour rage, but there’s room to explore those feelings in the music. I was very intentional in creating that space for talking about my experiences. I don’t have this persona of the lovely little singer-songwriter who sings sweet stuff into her acoustic guitar. This isn’t to say it misrepresents femininity. But for me, it’s actually really gruesome to be a woman.”

The gruesomeness she refers to comes to life on the album through vignettes of misogyny, domesticity, getting older and difficult relationships. Several images emerge: bad gut feelings, Freudian complexes, future children, femicide, mortgages, watching sports, and nasal decongestants.

In exploring these thoughts, she moves between heart-in-hand and tongue-in-cheek. She combs through love’s crests and trenches on tracks like ‘Waves’; navigates the instability of life on ‘Music’; and then wryly reflects on the restorative effects of green juice.

“I put whatever I can say into the music,” Niamh says, when pressed on the specifics. Questions about the direct meaning of specific lyrics are returned with an encouraging, ‘It’s all in the margins’ nod.

THE MESSAGE

On ‘Madonna’, she enquires about the Madonna-whore complex – a Freudian psychoanalytic label concerning an inability to maintain desire in a committed relationship, which has taken on different meanings with time. “Is it a thing?” she sings...

“I think the whole idea of me asking the question is not having to delve further,” she says. “Everyone has their own idea or interpretation of it, and of what I meant by including it.”

In this sense, Niamh’s lyrics form equivocal shapes for the listener to fill in. Many songs feel like Rorschach tests asking whether you hear resilience or pain, spiritual hunger or loss of appetite, mundanity or surrealism. Often, it’s hard to tell the difference. That said, she’s happy to offer hints.

“The title for Come As You Are comes from the song ‘Waves’,” she notes. “People think I’m just a big Nirvana nerd or something. But I simply liked the sentiment of ‘come as you are’. It sums up the album thematically and in terms of the message I wanted to get across.

“Say your friend calls asking you to come out and you’re like: ‘Jesus, I am not in a good way, I can’t face it.’ Then they say: ‘Ah here. Come as you are, we’re waiting for you.’ How beautiful is that?”

“Come As You Are is really about accepting yourself and realising when you lose sight of yourself. Everyone loses it at some point and no one gets away from sadness. Some people might hide it better than others. But you forget who you are and what you were like, how light the world felt then. You have to love yourself back into that.”

• Come As You Are is out May 31. Niamh Regan plays Cyprus Avenue, Cork (November 14) and Liberty Hall, Dublin (15)