April 2026

The Secret That Sounds Like a Scream: Rún’s Debut Is a Signal from the Deep

Rún’s self-titled debut is a raw, ritualistic force from Ireland secret, grief, and fire folded into six tracks. This is Rún.

There are records you put on and immediately understand. Then there are records that put something on you, something that sits heavy on your chest and won’t be explained away. Rún, the debut album from the Irish trio of the same name, belongs firmly to the second kind. It arrived on August 22, 2025 via Rocket Recordings, and it has not been politely waiting for your attention. It has been demanding it. The word Rún is Irish. It can mean secret, mystery, or love, or perhaps some elusive combination of the three, reflecting the many aspects of life that defy easy explanation.

That layered meaning isn’t incidental, it is the whole architecture of this record. The band chose it deliberately. The name came out of the same stew of ideas and material as the music itself. The band were looking at Ogham Script and Runes, and the Irish word Rún means secret. They describe themselves as trying to get past a kind of veneer of a materialist idea of Irishness.

What comes out the other side of that effort is not easy listening. It is necessary listening.

Three People, One Uncommon Language

Rún brings together vocal artist Tara Baoth Mooney, Dublin composer and performer Diarmuid MacDiarmada, and drummer, sound designer, and engineer Rian Trench. Each of them arrives at this project carrying a different creative lineage. Tara Baoth Mooney is a sometime Jim Henson voice artist with a longstanding background in folk, choral music, and experimental filmmaking. Diarmuid MacDiarmada is a Nurse With Wound co-conspirator and brother of Lankum’s Cormac, with avant-garde collaborations stretching back over thirty years. Rian Trench has worked on everything from the psychedelic IDM of Solar Bears to orchestral arrangements, and owns the studio, The Meadow on Ireland’s East Coast, where the album was made.

Rian met Tara about six years ago when a band she was with booked recording time with him. They connected instantly. During lockdown, the two collaborated remotely on audio-visual ideas. The trio’s working process from there was patient, almost organic. After spending three years together, taking things as they came, it was amazing to discover that an album had emerged.

That patience shows. Nothing here sounds forced into shape.

Rún: What the Sound Actually Does

The album opens with Paidir Poball (Pupil), and it sets a tone immediately. Mooney’s extraordinary tremulous voice spreads out over a sinister scraping noise, before doom distortion, quasi-pagan chanting, reverberant screams, synths, and heavy drums all arrive like a flood.

From there, the record doesn’t follow a single path. What follows is a surprising tangent into a kind of raw trip-hop in ‘Your Death My Body,’ with the band playing with horror not just as a trope, but as a worldly experience. There’s a 23 Skidoo/LCD conflation in the cudgelling agit-funk of ‘Your Death My Body’ as Mooney’s vocal textures, bitterly sweet then feverishly screaming, ghost from Callas to Gibbons in a shiver.d of earned restraint.

Then comes Terror Moon, which the band have spoken about directly. The band describes the energy of ‘Terror Moon’ as a volatile space, barely containing the huge spilling emotion that rises in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Percussion here is thunderous, mantric, relentless. It is raw, percussive, and hypnotic.

On production, the sound is deep and cinematic, with so much clarity. ‘Strike It’ is urgent and huge sounding, showing so much imagination. The shouted “Strike it!” that opens that track, followed by its wailing refrain, is one of those moments where distilled chaos is most effective, with brutal lyrics and a persistent distorted bass riff.

The record closes with Caoineadh (keening). The closer brings us back towards traditional music, with fiddle and a melody that would work beautifully as Sean-nós. Delivered over a simple bass line and droning strings with a vaguely dub-like sensibility, it develops before degrading altogether into a fuzzy event horizon and closure.

The Studio as a Ritual Space: Production Notes

Specific gear lists and session-by-session recording details are. No official interview or press release consulted for this piece itemises studio equipment, signal chains, or microphone choices. This gap exists because the band’s documented interviews focus on process as ritual rather than on technical specification.

What is confirmed: the album was made at The Meadow, Rian Trench’s studio on Ireland’s East Coast. And the process itself was described in detail. The music was developed largely in various domestic spaces, with Diarmuid and Tara often capturing what they were doing on a phone or portable recorder from a far corner of the room.

That lo-fi capture in domestic spaces, alongside final production at The Meadow, likely explains the textural contrast in the album, but any deeper technical claim beyond what the band have confirmed would be an invention, so it stops here.

What Diarmuid has described about the visual approach to making music is telling, though. He describes approaching music in a painterly way, almost in a sculptural way, with the band looking to the Polish painter Zbigniew Beksiński, and watching films by Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Quay Brothers for atmosphere and ways of thinking about things.

The record sounds exactly like that. Sculpted, not merely recorded.

What Rún Is Actually About

Tara has spoken about the album drawing parallels between normalisations of abuse across different contexts: trauma around the Catholic Church in Ireland and institutional abuse, as well as what is happening in Palestine.

The band describe their creative approach as ritualistic. At the most basic level, a ritual approach lifts one’s actions and one’s perception out of the mundane, finding a kind of sacredness in the ordinary stuff of life.

The cramming together of these disparate sounds and sources, all expressive of an internal chaos, emerges as a kind of collective scream of rage and collective grief. It forces the listener to find a path through its strangeness, and in so doing confront their response to topics such as the Tuam mother and baby homes, the Palestinian genocide, and perhaps the sheer agony of existing in the face of everything the world is throwing at us.

Rún is not asking you to relax. It is asking you to remain present. There is a difference, and this band knows it.