Poor Creature, a collaboration between Ruth Clinton (Landless), Cormac MacDiarmada and John Dermody (both of Lankum), are one of the most distinctive voices in the new wave of Irish folk.
Born in lockdown, their sound is rooted in tradition yet shaped by experimentation — taking age-old songs and reshaping them through vintage organs, looping drum machines, and intuitive improvisation.
They arrive at YES Basement with material from their debut album All Smiles Tonight — a record rich with atmosphere, loss, and spectral beauty. Expect swirling arrangements that drift between the hypnotic (‘Adieu Lovely Erin’) and the haunting (‘Willie-O’), all wrapped in the trio’s uncanny ability to weave melody, memory and mood.
This is folk music with an otherworldly edge — American bluegrass unearthed in a ruined chapel, ghost stories told through a haze of organ drones and delay. Whether reworking Irish ballads or Appalachian laments, Poor Creature create songs that speak to the past while rooted in the disquiet of the present. Live, their music takes on a conversational shape — voices and instruments tumbling in and out of phase, conjuring the mystical and the mundane in the same breath.
A chance to hear something ancient and utterly new, in the close quarters of YES Basement.
