The Mary Wallopers

The Mary Wallopers drag Irish ballads out of the museum and back into the pub, where a boozing shanty and a hanged-man's lament can share the same breath without either being softened.

The trick is that they refuse to treat these old songs as fragile. "All for Me Grog" is bellowed like closing time, all stomp and slurred defiance, and then "The Butcher Boy" arrives with a dead girl swinging from a rope, sung plainly enough that the horror lands without any theatrical hush. Radie Peat's voice on "Frost Is All Over" pulls the record toward the darker Lankum end of this same Dundalk-and-Dublin revival, proof the Wallopers can hold a room silent as easily as they can start a singalong. That range — grog to gallows in one sitting — is why the debut plays less like nostalgia and more like a wake that keeps turning into a party.