Ash Red – The Foreign Game (2025)
Irish post-punk has been on a tear these past few years, but Ash Red’s The Foreign Game feels less like another entry in the lineage and more like a tightening of the screws.
The Cork-based trio, Arthur Murray, Tadhg O’Keeffe, and Isaac Walsh, arrive with a debut album that plays like a mission statement, a sharpening of the dark, bass-forward sound they hinted at on their STUPID EP, which quietly cracked the UK Alternative Albums Charts last year. Now, with a full-length released via Blowtorch Records, Ash Red sounds bigger, bolder, and far more dangerous.
The Foreign Game is an album built on emotional, sonic, and moral tension. It’s steeped in the existential grit of life on the Irish live circuit, where the band cut their teeth with over 70 shows in Cork alone, plus key slots with everyone from Public Image Ltd. to the regulars at Dublin’s Workman’s Club. That road-worn grind bleeds into every corner of the record. Thick basslines stalk the edges, drums punch through with unvarnished urgency, and Murray’s vocals hover between wounded and confrontational, like he’s trying to hold a cracked world together using only the force of his voice.
The focus track, ‘Friends?’, hits at the heart of the album’s themes: identity, belonging, and the uncomfortable gap between who we are and who the world insists we be. Murray wrestles with fragile relationships and existential doubt, letting lines like “It’s a means to an end, who you call your friends” land with a cynicism that feels earned rather than bitter. But the band never let the darkness fully consume them. The chorus blooms into something hopeful: “And I’ll see you again, and we can be friends, just don’t talk about it…” It’s the kind of emotional whiplash that made Joy Division so compelling, and Ash Red tap into that lineage without becoming derivative.
This particular track is a microcosm of the album’s entire palette. A reverb-drenched jangle, somewhere between The Smiths and early Cure, sets the tone before O’Keeffe’s monolithic bass and Walsh’s cavernous drums drag everything into deeper shadows. When the distortion finally detonates before the chorus, it mirrors the Albini-esque production choices that define the record: raw, live, and uncomfortably intimate.
Elsewhere, the band flexes both force and finesse. ‘Island’s Edge’ is all jagged riffs and claustrophobic intensity, while ‘Alone Again’ drifts into more delicate territory without losing the band’s trademark weight. The title track, which closes the album, circles back to the thematic spine of the outsider, the exile, the lost figure staring in from the margins. It’s a fitting end for a record obsessed with borders, both personal and societal, and the often-painful act of crossing them.
With The Foreign Game, Ash Red position themselves as one of Ireland’s most compelling new voices. A band capable of merging post-punk’s raw physicality with atmospheric introspection. It’s a debut that feels less like an opening statement and more like a warning shot.
If Fontaines D.C. lit the fuse for this era of Irish post-punk, Ash Red might just be the ones carrying the torch into darker terrain.
Find out more about Ash Red on their official website, Instagram and Spotify.
This artist was sent to us by MusicBox PR.
