Ellie O'Neill is on the rise

"Every element of it bleeds in perfectly together in that one moment. That is something I’ve definitely learned how to do. And it takes ages to learn how to do it. It’s like you’re able to lift something really heavy with what seems like very little difficulty.”

When the Irish singer/songwriter takes to the stage of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) later that evening to support Dove Ellis, we get a sense of what she means. In unreleased numbers like “Peter’s Song”, she will meander surrealistically for a while, before snapping suddenly into these moments of melodic and emotional clarity that pin you to the wall. “I miss you most with my boys’ clothes on,” she sings with heartbreaking simplicity in the latter. “Yeah, I miss you most when I can’t be where I’m from.”

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It is a song about queerness and integrity, with its androgynous teenage hero as a lode star, glittering above the stifling conventionality of life in Co. Meath. In her lyrics, her coming-of-age sounds painful; in conversation, she doesn’t dwell on it.

“I grew up there, half an hour outside Dublin, and played football,” she says, in summary of her background. “Like: a lot.” She means Gaelic football, and she was really good. “I played for Meath, which is the highest level you can get to. I was a midfielder: you do everything but score. For ages I was just doing that and not doing music. I was 21 when I stopped. And then Meath got to the All-Ireland, and won. Three times.”

By then, O’Neill was studying English at university. She dropped out of a music degree first, dismayed at how prescriptive it was. “I did a year of that and hated it. It was just so machine – a conveyor-belt of people who wanted to be songwriters, and I didn’t feel inspired. I find it hard to write if there’s a big focus on the marketing of music as a product. I think if you let that get in, it can be quite hard to get to the place you want to.” Literature opened new creative doors. “Once you could pick your own subjects, I was reading a lot of lesbian poetry and modernist surrealist novels; the Beats and Eileen Myles; Audre Lorde and Sontag.”

The effect on her music was seismic. “That all impacted hugely,” she says. “I’ve always been drawn to lyric-writing first, so that was partly why I wanted to study literature. It was cool to see how you could reinvent things and not have to write in conventional ways.” She explains the concept of linear temporality, and how by breaking down this dominant form of linguistic expression, “you can basically do what you want”. Applying those rules to music, she realised that a lot of artists she already loved, like Sinéad O’Connor, had been writing in that vein, using repeated chants. O’Neill’s songs “Sister of the Sea”, “Sean’s Song”, “Little Sister” and the stunning “Great White Wing” do something similar: “I feel like within the forms of all of them they have little rolling cycles, little waves that build and break,” she says.

We are chatting in the ‘Snug’ at the ICA, a curious cubby-hole near the main space. An uneven ceiling curves low above us. A poster on the opposite wall reads, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’. We’re sitting on little white stools in front of a Formica-topped table. O’Neill, who has rosy cheeks and an agreeable air of sincerity, is dressed all in black but for the silver stripes of her skirt. She is talking now about the book on which she wrote her dissertation – Djuna Barnes’ landmark lesbian novel, Nightwood, a dazzling mid-‘30s story of agony in bohemia – and as she does, her face lights up.

In her flawless summary, “It’s this really dark and beautiful novel about the ‘20s in Paris and a lot of freaks and people living there to survive.” It was the inspiration for her bracing first single, “Bohemia”, released in November. She wrote the song in 10 minutes. “It’s quite simple in form,” she says. “I had found Nightwood and felt a lot of kinship with the story, but also the way it was told. It’s surreal and there are lots of references to the beloved, or people being larger than life in a mythological sense. There’s loads of amazing lines from that book…” She tails off, thinking about them, her eyes shining. “I’ll probably misquote them but it was just so embedded in me at the time…”

“Bohemia” has a little Irish language in it, but O’Neill is suspicious of the way Irishness makes itself known in art. “It’s impossible for your background to not show up on you as an artist, and obviously the rhythm of Irish speech is mirrored in the rhythm of my lyrics, but…” She winces. “I don’t know if I buy into the James Joyce of it all, necessarily.” This is one of the greatest sentences I have ever heard. I ask her to elaborate. “I don’t know if that necessarily has to be in everything that comes out of Ireland in order for it to be good. We don’t have to continue to lean on that.” What do you replace it with? “Whatever comes out,” she says.

We go back to the beginning, and her earliest influences. She wasn’t from a particularly musical household. “I think music was kind of a left-field thing for me to be so into. But my dad did teach me my first chords: a song called ‘Bright Blue Rose’ written by Jimmy MacCarthy, which is so, so beautiful.” She took formal guitar lessons but was the only girl in the class of six, so mostly taught herself at home. She rinsed her parents’ Michael Jackson and Christy Moore CDs. Aged 19, she discovered Judee Sill; then, later, Leonard Cohen and Adrianne Lenker.

In April 2024, O’Neill opened for Lenker on the Irish leg of the Bright Future tour, including an unforgettable show at St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny. The two artists bonded a little off-stage over their shared horror of the internet. She has also supported Irish folk artist John Francis Flynn, who was so impressed that he invited O’Neill to duet with him in the main set.

The audience at the ICA are won over in a similar way. They’re here to see Dove Ellis, and when O’Neill steps on stage, they’re still chattering and chuntering, but as soon as she opens her mouth and starts to race around the octaves, their attention turns rapt. It is pin-drop silent for the songs, while the din that follows each one just keeps escalating, not least because of the way she ends them, with a flight of falsetto or an abrupt and punchy stop. By the end, the atmosphere is raucous. As O’Neill plays the final descending chords of “Peter’s Song” and ducks out, one Ellis fan turns to his mate, both of them looking mildly dazed. “That was incredible,” he grins. “We can go home now.”

O’Neill’s distinctive, tuned-down, freewheeling guitar-playing has attracted almost as much attention as her voice, and she says there’s a clear parallel between her interest in reinventing artistic form, and her sexuality. “I think trying to find a way around the guitar that isn’t given to me is similar to what you have to do as a queer person – finding a route that isn’t given to you. In terms of both queerness and art, you don’t have a map so you have to crash your way through, even if that’s in a very personal, silent way. I think there’s obvious reasons why a lot of queer people are artists or activists or both.”

At some stage, she will get another band together, but at the moment she’s most energised by the idea of ambitious studio work. “Before I’d made my first thing ever, I was really purist about it, like, ‘I want to be able to replicate it live’, and now I don’t care about that. I’m just interested in being surprised about what I can make, thinking, ‘There’s so much more I can do.’”

Her most recent release is an elusive, hypnotic second single, “Little Sister”, which took twice as long to write as “Bohemia”, at a whopping 20 minutes. “It’s an example, I think, of how lots of things are almost suspended in your mind, or wherever you keep them, and then they just come up in the stream.”

Of late, she has been writing in a more direct and grounded vein. “That’s really freeing. To say, ‘It doesn’t all have to be like a dream.’ The gateway for me was starting to write portrait songs as gifts for people. I did the first one during Covid. Do you know that feeling of, ‘Oh actually people that you love don’t live near you, probably forever, and you just won’t see them all the time’? It’s such a crazy thing to me. But it’s nice to feel that at least you have that song.”

And the song is the thing. O’Neill has already told me that her ambitions are purely creative: about seeing where the music can go, not where it can take her commercially. I ask if she’s had such a thing as a career highlight. “I really loved those gigs with Adrianne,” she says. “But I think the career highlight is writing the song.” She furrows her brow. “That’s probably a shit answer. But I do feel like that is the moment where I feel, ‘Whatever happens after this is fine.’”