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

At 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,” c...