Madra Salach are remoulding traditional Irish folk to their own blistering tune

A t this year’s edition of tastemaker new music festival The Great Escape, the most potent performance of the weekend belonged to a band whose roots stretch back more than a century.

In the absolutely heaving basement of Brighton’s Chalk, Dublin sextet Madra Salach unleashed their visceral, punk-entwined take on Irish trad classics dating back to the 1950s (‘Murphy Can Never Go Home’) and the 1870s (‘Spancil Hill’), weaving their tales of displaced immigrants mourning for a sense of belonging among original new songs finding kinship within grief, love and loss.

READ MORE: NME’s top 10 shows from The Great Escape 2026 At the set’s climax was closer ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’: a slow-burning moment of ultimate emotional purging, dredged audibly from the core of vocalist Paul Banks.

A song that eulogises the self-destructive line between pleasure and pain, it was written in mandolin player Jack Martin’s bedroom a short couple of years ago, but its hardened, world-weary sentiments – like much of Madra Salach’s outlook as a whole – feel timeless.

“The thing that I like about that line (“ For the man who seeks pleasure, is the man who seeks pain ”) is that it’s not saying anything new,” considers Banks, speaking to NME alongside Martin during a rare day off in Dublin.

“It’s a behavioural pattern that a lot of people are stuck in that’s been summed up into a sentence that I can then scream over a drone, which then feels cathartic for me and seems to be cathartic for people watching.

For a long time when we were gigging it, I’d almost always get too close to the line emotionally, and I’d be really dysregulated for an hour after the show.

And I think that speaks to…” He takes a beat.

“I like to think there’s something special about that song.” Their live show’s gut-punching closing moments are but one reason why the band – completed by guitarist Adam Cullen, bassist Jack Lawlor, drummer Dara Duffy and harmonium player Maxime Arnold – have become one of 2026’s most unmissable new acts.

Last summer, Madra Salach were yet to play a festival outside of their native Ireland; this year, they’re notching up around 30, from a support at Kneecap ’s London all-dayer (where one in five people seemed to be sporting their merch) to hefty slots at Green Man, TRNSMT and Electric Picnic.

“The fact that it’s having this much commercial success is blowing my mind, because my hopes for this project were to find our own little pocket in the niche folk revival so we could play small rooms in Dublin,” Banks says.

B ut even from the beginnings of the project in 2023, Madra Salach have never stayed in just one lane.

Their genesis is a “blurry” one, the two musicians state.