Ireland's Hilary Woods casts a hypnotic spell with 'Night CRIÚ'

Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.

Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.

For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of the grunge-leaning, mainstream-breaching Dublin trio JJ72. She left in 2003, shortly after the release of their second album. Following a breather, her first solo album came out in 2013. Woods’ last two LPs, 2020’s Birthmarks and 2023’s Acts Of Light, were entirely instrumental; free of vocals. Now, she is setting her voice to music.

Her spectral new album – the second word of the title translates as “crew” – employs a type of minimalist maximalism: there is a children’s choir, a brass band. But each musical collective is muted, with the deft production giving a distance to everything. What could be ostentatious is instead restrained. The drone elements suffusing Birthmarks and Acts Of Light are largely absent.

Although the lyrics are hard to discern – presumably intentionally – and impressionistic, the main theme of the album appears to be finding what is buried within the psyche and making it apparent: expressing what surfaces subsequent to breaching the barriers sealing-in the unconscious. Dig in, but don’t be surprised if Night CRIÚ casts a spell this-close to hypnosis.

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