Sinéad O’Connor famously stared at the camera for almost the entirety of her “Nothing Compares 2 U” video, her eyes vast and pleading, a single teardrop finally sliding down her cheek. Fellow Irish singer Radie Peat similarly holds the center of the frame for the seven-minute entirety of her clip for “The Moon And Stars.” But the effect is different. Peat’s eyes are hard and accusatory, and the shadows across her face are as severe as the song’s haunted foghorn drone. For Peat, a great many things might compare 2 U.
In the band Lankum and on her own, Radie Peat twists the familiar sound of traditional Irish folk music into darker, more ominous shapes than what we’re used to hearing. “The Moon And Stars” is a poetically harrowing wallow in lust and guilt and expectation: “I’ll go down to my father’s garden, and I will sit and cry my fill/ For when I gave myself away, it was of my own free will.” Peat’s allusions to homemade abortion remedies hit harder when you remember that her homeland didn’t legalize abortion until 2019. Peat’s voice is icy and monumental, and she surrounds it with a pounding, swirling arrangement that sounds like howling choirs of ghosts. Her narrator cries up to the moon and stars, but their weeping cannot save her. —Tom
