Cork’s Adam O’Donovan, better known by his moniker M’ADAM, has always carried a reflective streak in his music. But on his second album ‘Before We Die’, that quiet introspection expands into something larger, delivering a work that grapples with grief, the traces of memory, and what remains when we’re gone.
Produced by Kealan Kenny, the record finds its footing somewhere between indie-folk intimacy, folk-rock grit, and chamber pop grandeur. The sound is delicate but layered, textured by Áine Delaney’s evocative string arrangements and the voices of collaborators like SAL, Sarah Hickey, and Dylan Howe. The late poet Eoin Murray appears too, in recordings woven throughout the album as spectral commentary, reminding us how the departed remain interlaced with the living.
The title ‘Before We Die’ suggests urgency, but also a gentleness; sharing an acknowledgment that life and loss are not neat opposites, but overlapping states we carry with us. Songs move through stages of mourning and remembrance, but they never feel heavy for heaviness’ sake. There’s a tenderness at the core, a sense that mourning is itself a form of love. On tracks like ‘A song’ and ‘We don’t know’, the arrangements swell and recede like tides, while quieter passages leave space for both breath and for our own ghosts to surface.
Where M’ADAM’s 2023 debut ‘Horse Food Budget 1984’ introduced him as an experimental voice unafraid to be unconventional, ‘Before We Die’ shows an artist growing into a deeper clarity. He sounds softer when he needs to be, fiercer when the subject demands it, but always rooted in raw sincerity.
For listeners drawn to the lyricism of Sufjan Stevens or Phoebe Bridgers, there’s a familiar emotional current here, yet M’ADAM’s writing carries its own distinctly Irish cadence, the lilt of language shaped by place and history. This is an album of both grief and connection, a reminder that the ones we’ve lost still move within us, even in silence.
‘Before We Die’ is one to sit with, letting its weight settle, and finding the glimmers of light that O’Donovan insists are always there.