Pillow Queens are reaching new heights by going to great depths

“Delighted.” “That’s the aim!” “Class.”

That’s how Sarah Corcoran, Cathy McGuinness, and Pamela Connolly respectively respond when I divulged just how much their new album, Name Your Sorrow, made me bawl. In my room, on the bus, walking down the street — tears sprang up and out unexpectedly and with embarrassing velocity. And that, it seems, was precisely the desired reaction.

All good art is evocative and affecting, that’s why we resonate and interact with it. It reaches deep down into our murky depths and pulls at our heartstrings, striking a chord, and leaving us feeling understood, cleansed, different.

The landscape of heartbreak is a well explored territory, but when you’re in the throes of it, loneliness abounds. That’s the thread that Pillow Queens pull loose and unravel with this album. They lay love and loss under the microscope and examine all the messy complexities contained within. Desire, longing, insecurity, self-worth, pettiness, reprieve, anger, fear, and hope. It’s all present and accounted for across the 12 tracks of Name Your Sorrow.

Breaking out of the city for a sojourn in the Burren, the band settled into a tacit rhythm that they say were some of the most communal writing sessions they’ve had so far. “We had to break through the rawness and embarrassment quickly, and just say how we felt,” Sarah says. “When you’re cut off from everything like that, where it feels like you’re the only people for miles around, it makes you think of things in a different way. You can tap into that vulnerability in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling pretentious.”

Following up from their first album, In Waiting, and their sophomore record, Leave the Light On, endeavouring to put out three albums in three years might come with some degree of pressure, but through a self-imposed 9-5 routine and a resolve to only put out music on their terms, they settled into what Cathy describes as the most fluid and honest creative process they’ve shared.

Working with Nashville-based producer Colin Pastor — who has worked with the likes of Lucy Dacus and boygenius — on a three week recording session at female-owned Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry allowed Pillow Queens to take a more experimental approach, plucking at grand pianos and picking up harmonicas to create more layers of sound than ever before. Of working with Colin, Cathy says he “managed to capture exactly what we wanted to capture, and made it bigger and better.”

The first song released off the album was ‘Suffer’, a track that captures the melancholic, dull ache of a relationship unraveling, unpicks the turbulent struggle to let go. Elsewhere, ‘Like A Lesson’ explores a longing for intimacy and the insecurities that are part and parcel of sharing yourself with someone new.

Speaking on ‘Gone’, a song that showcases a vulnerability that allows for no silver linings, Pamela says it’s “not trying to push a narrative of ‘everything is going to get better’. A lot of the album is not trying to make heartbreak look nice, because a lot of sadness and grief and healing is not nice to look at. There are slivers of light, but it can also be bleak, so sit in that, feel it, and express it in some way.”

“The only way to heal from these things is to experience them and sit in the sadness,” Sarah says. “I’m all for getting over things, but sometimes life is hard and sh*t happens and you just have to be sad for a while.”

Cathy boils it down: “The early stages of grief are like angry outbursts. It’s angsty and it can be immature and unreasonable, but that’s also valid.”

‘Notes on Worth’ closes the record out with a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel with the lyrics “I don’t wanna go home alone this weekend/I think I’m worth the time/I’m worth the time.” This empowering endnote speaks to the band’s careful curation of the listening experience. “We wanted this record to be a journey through the stages of a breakup, traveling through those moments of reprieve and turbulence, with that breath of fresh air at the end to be the new day after the storm.,” Cathy says.
“Side A and Side B are like different projects,” Sarah explains. “We wanted people to feel a certain type of way when they get up to flip the record, and feel new once they start listening to the second side.”

With their previous album, the band wanted Leave the Light On to encourage duality, so I wonder what they want Name Your Sorrow to muster up in their listeners?

For Cathy, it’s experiencing the album as a fully realised journey, and listening to it from start to finish. “I would love for people to really connect with it and connect with themselves.” This sentiment is echoed by Sarah: “I hope people put themselves in the first person and be the main character of the album. To experience the record as themselves. We wrote it for a certain reason, but I would love for people to have that themselves, regardless of our own personal intent. Enjoy the catharsis that’s there to be enjoyed.”

For Pamela, it’s all about that raw, emotional response: “I hope people can pick up on and appreciate what we’re trying to do sonically. The drums and the harmonies and all these things that, for me, make the album. I want people to listen to it and get a huge emotional response.”

Since their inception in 2016, Pillow Queens broke onto the global stage with a flourish. Touring across the UK, US, and Europe, supporting some of their own musical heroes including Phoebe Bridgers and Pavement, appearing on the Late Late Show with James Corden, being called ‘life affirming’ by NME — the accolades are endless, and their star is absolutely still on the rise.

Name Your Sorrow exists where audacious vulnerability and powerful, polished craftsmanship meet, and though it may be early doors, it sounds a lot like Irish Album of the Year to me. With their biggest headline show to date taking place at the Iveagh Gardens on 13 July, a string of UK dates rapidly selling out this June, and whispers of international festival slots in the pipeline for summer, Pillow Queens are without a doubt one of Ireland’s best musical exports.