On a hot Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, while many are nursing halfway-point hangovers, the Dublin garage punk quartet Sprints whip up a jubilant mosh pit with their charged tune Descartes, Irish tricolour flags bobbing above them. As summer speeds on, at Japan’s Fuji rock festival, new songs from Galway indie act NewDad enrapture the crowd. Travy, a Nigerian-born and Tallaght-raised rapper, crafts a mixtape inflected with his Dublin lilt, the follow-up to the first Irish rap album to top the Irish charts. Efé transcends Dublin bedroom pop to get signed by US label Fader, and on Later … With Jools Holland, George Houston performs the haunting Lilith – a tribute to political protest singers everywhere – in a distinctive Donegal accent.

From Melbourne to Mexico City, concertgoers continue to scream to that opening loop on strings of Fontaines DC’s Starburster, and CMAT’s viral “woke macarena” dance to her hit single Take a Sexy Picture of Me plays out in festival pits and on TikTok. You might have heard about Kneecap, too.

Ireland has always had a fair few punks, ravers and big indie acts, be it the Cranberries, Ash or Bicep, but it’s never had an alternative music scene quite as robust or diverse as today’s: Lankum, Gilla Band, Pillow Queens, For Those I Love, John Francis Flynn and Chalk are some of the other acclaimed names, alongside a thriving underground rap scene. It’s now so successful that it is redefining what “Irish music” even is, as doors open to musicians once left out of the country’s cultural conversation.

“It’s been an Irish renaissance,” says Karla Chubb, Sprints’ singer and guitarist. The group are now midway through a UK tour, with US shows next year; they are the first Irish band signed to US indie label Sub Pop. She cites Fontaines DC and CMAT as “a blueprint” for making it internationally. “As a Dublin band, you’d once have hoped to play Vicar Street”, a mid-sized venue. “Now we have the drive to go bigger.” Music, she says, is no longer an “unpaid internship”.

Uniting today’s acts is a spirit of rebellion, quick wit and vulnerable lyricism, with recurring themes of solidarity and marginalisation, made by a youth still emerging from the Troubles and the legacy of the Celtic Tiger (the Irish property boom, 2008 crash and subsequent recession). Sprints lit up a banner for trans rights during their Glasto set, while Dundalk act the Mary Wallopers had their set at Portsmouth’s Victorious festival cut after they voiced their support for Palestine. Irish Artists for Palestine recently facilitated an Irish tour for the all-women Palestinian choir Daughters of Jerusalem. “This understanding of oppression and colonialism we have is generational,” says Dan Hoff of Dublin five-piece Gurriers.

Sprints’ second album, released in September, is “inspired by the disparity of finally realising our dreams and doing music full-time, against the homeless crisis in Ireland, the war in Gaza, the cost of living,” says Chubb. “They’re issues all across Europe, so on an international stage, we’re shining a light on a shared struggle.”

“The songs are written about Ireland, but I wanted to write them in a universal understanding,” says Hoff. His band Gurriers released debut album Come and See in 2024, supported Fontaines DC and landed a track on EA Sports FC 26. The band are vexed about the far right’s rise in Ireland and beyond, and their spitting protest song Approachable was written in the voice of an online rightwing edgelord; Dipping Out is about the Irish emigrating, but expands, Hoff says, “like an Adam Curtis documentary, critiquing the zeitgeist.

“People feel isolated and let down by those in power … the situation isn’t just an Irish one. I try to avoid any Irish idioms in my lyrics,” Hoff adds.

“The world is pretty much on fire … and against this rise in AI-generated music, people want something real and grounding. This is something Ireland does incredibly well,” says Nikki MacRae, music officer at Belfast city council. “Irish songwriters have always championed authenticity, and audiences crave this more than ever.”

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“Irishness has become a thing people covet,” agrees Julie Dawson of NewDad, “which is mad, because not too long ago it was something people scorned.” For years British listeners would mostly reach for mainstream acts (Westlife, U2, the Corrs, B*Witched) or trad folk. Meanwhile, radio in Ireland has long been dominated by British and US acts, or otherwise limited to domestic acts Snow Patrol and Hozier, with most Irish artists deemed niche. “About nine years ago, a local artist once had their track turned down for radio play because they’d already played an Irish track that week,” says MacRae. “What makes Irish musicians class is that in the face of such challenges they double down.”

Trad metal outfit the Scratch’s Cathal McKenna recalls 2011’s Oxegen festival, held not far outside Dublin, and hosting almost exclusively international headliners. “We took our influences from them … Now, seeing Ireland’s festivals filled with Irish acts feels powerful,” McKenna says, from All Together Now to Electric Picnic. “People have their own stories, languages and cities represented by amazing artists. We’re naturally confident now in a way we just weren’t back then.”

As well as the music itself, there are some clear forces behind this shift. A generation of gen Z and millennial artists are reckoning with what it meant to come of age through recession, austerity and the tail end of the Troubles. The music pulsates with the sense of promises made and withdrawn: CMAT pricks the economic bubble and its devastating aftermath on her song Euro-Country, symbolised by her dancing around her soulless hometown shopping centre in the video. But there is a defiant call-to-action too. “I know it can be better if we hound it,” she sings.

In Northern Ireland, noise-punk band Enola Gay’s track PTS.DUP addressed a sectarian attack on guitarist Joe McVeigh that left him with a fractured skull. Meanwhile, on their thrashing Stiff Little Fingers-influenced song I Think You Should Leave, queer DIY punk band Problem Patterns still find hope in building community in Belfast: “Everything always comes back to the Troubles,” the song goes, “we’ve got to release the dead hand of the past.”

“I think artists from Northern Ireland are thriving right now because we’ve all grown up with generational trauma and that makes for some excellent art,” says the band’s Beth Crooks. “The song is about how we love living here, in spite of the mass emigration that we see from our peers. If the right people stick around and push for change then it’s bound to happen.”

James Robinson, founder of Belfast’s Craic magazine, says the renaissance is partly down to local media outlets such as the Thin Air, Yeo, Nialler9 and District documenting these scenes before the British or international press caught on, alongside conferences such as Output and AVA festival, all of them “encouraging more acts to start up and keep the momentum going”. The British media’s recent embrace of politically vocal Irish artists, he adds, suggests a “somewhat British fragility” about overlooking this scene in previous generations; a move past the shamrocks’n’Guinness fetishisation of Irish culture to instead really listen to Irish voices.

Numerous people I speak to say another chief reason for such a thriving scene is Ireland’s growing cultural diversity. “Artists are shouting loud in the face of attempts to narrow the perception of what is Irish,” says MacRae, as xenophobic and racist unrest has gripped the country in recent months.

Belfast-based rapper Emby brought dance music festival AVA its first ever grime set. After competing against Beyoncé and the Weeknd at the 2025 Grammys, another Belfast boy, Jordan Adetunji, continues to blend quickfire rap with trap, post-punk guitars and African dance. Spider, the Tallaght-born, now London-based producer, grew up on 90s riot grrrl acts such as Bikini Kill and Veruca Salt. Like McKenna, she had few Irish references (save, she says, for the Cranberries), and even now, “the scene can be very white and male-dominated”, she says. “But it’s at a really exciting place. We’re seeing more Irish people of colour, women and queer people come up, and the music is only getting better.”

Monjola is the co-founder of Dublin’s five-year-old Chamomile Club label and collective. Their slogan is BKDI: Black Kids Doing It. “We’ve established an ecosystem,” says Monjola. “We’re musicians but also videographers, graphic designers, producers, stylists.” Chamomile act Moio crossed over with 2024 single Moments, topping Spotify’s Viral 50. “The Black Irish experience is super unique,” Monjola adds. “We don’t have a blueprint, so we’re following our gut – and that’s resonating.”

Ballymun-founded rap group Bricknasty blend hip-hop, neo-soul, rave and garage with lyrics in Gaelic – their single Is é a Locht a Laghad is a stark track about heritage and hardship. Frontman Fatboy says he was “eating curry-paste wraps because I couldn’t buy chicken” – until they supported Coldplay at Dublin’s Croke Park as the backing band for Irish singer Aby Coulibaly, and put together their recent mixtape Black’s Law. They’re now getting ready for their first US headline tour in February. “You get a false sense of being class playing in Ireland, because the crowds are so deadly [good],” Fatboy says. “Sometimes what you need is to get ribbed. That’s how you learn.” They’ve won plenty of audiences over, though: “Seeing people elsewhere respond because they’ve gone through similar things is magical.”

Breakthroughs such as theirs are far from being a given, and artists from bigger cities tend to get more opportunities, but arts centres such as the Duncairn in Belfast encourage cross-border collaboration, creating fertile ground for agents and labels to scout.

Another huge boost came in October, when the Irish government announced that a pilot basic-income scheme for artists would become permanent. Public support has been strong, and an independent study from Alma Economics found it improved recipients’ creative productivity and mental wellbeing. With artists receiving €325 (£286) a week, the pilot scheme cost €25m a year, a relatively small investment to keep an entire arts scene thriving. Daniel “Lango” Lang of the Scratch says high youth unemployment once drove them to music: “The big challenge for young artists now is the cost of living, but a thriving scene breeds confidence.”

That confidence isn’t just firing up this new generation of acts – it’s changing the way Irish people think about themselves. “As a people, we are very self-effacing,” NewDad’s Dawson says. “We feel sincerely thankful – and even surprised – that people show up for us. I never thought a band formed by a bunch of teenagers in Galway would one day stand up on a big stage in Japan.”

Everyone I speak to has someone else to hype up, be it dream-pop and the Cure support act Just Mustard, folk collective Madra Salach, ambient artist Saoirse Miller or alt-rapper Khakikid. “We’re so proud of ourselves,” Dawson says. “Which is hard to say as an Irish person.”