Róisín

Do you remember Brockhampton Summer? For listeners of a particular age and background—too young to properly appreciate Odd Future but holding up as formative Blonde, Flower Boy, and SoundCloud rap—2017’s trilogy of SATURATION albums remains a benchmark. The group’s most mysterious member was the vocalist and producer Ciarán McDonald, known back then as Bearface. A prickly Northern Irishman in a rowdy, mostly Texan, L.A.-based “boy band,” McDonald was relegated, at first, to brooding bridges and disarmingly sweet outro ballads. But his marginality enhanced the effect of his appearances. The pitch-shifted shards from which Brockhampton assembled their songs, and their constant rotation between showoffy personalities, seemed to hide a striking figure in plain sight, someone especially keyed into the music’s stubborn textures and moods.

McDonald’s voice, with its whiny, digitized smear, anticipated a host of post-pandemic emo boys—think of your brakences or bixbys. Ciarán himself has spent an itinerant four years since Brockhampton’s dissolution in 2022 crafting Róisín, a solo debut that looks back through today’s bedroom-pop bricolage into the roomy vaults of D’Angelo and Prince. Those are big names! And Ciarán is deadly serious about them. Take the shocking single “Houston,” which announces itself with a dub siren and adapts a demo from the boy-band days into a full-on Voodoo tribute. A dry, squelchy funk backdrop and a deluge of gospeldelic vocals swirl in confined quarters, like Ciarán’s scrying the Electric Lady studio through a crystal ball. Egged on by his production, he warps between his falsetto and midrange and basks in a Texas love story, with a lyrical hat-tip to UGK for good measure. Just like Brockhampton, the song is impressive in its preening confidence and off-putting in its unsubtlety; D’Angelo rarely sang a line as brazen as, “No, he can’t fuck you like I can.”

Something about the album resists a quick approach, coating even loping jams like “Galvarino” in a sullen patina. Maybe it’s that vocal tone, which has a bit of a rapper’s brusqueness: he can impulsively meld with his FX chain to prod out at you or sink away, making him sound like a few people at once on “Dummy.” Or maybe it’s just the density of sketchy ideas per song. Consider mk.gee and Dijon’s experiments with space and dynamics over the past few years. (Dijon has been regularly working with Brockhampton alumni since contributing backing vocals to SATURATION II, and he’s a longtime friend and karaoke buddy of Ciarán’s.) Last year’s Baby accumulates lots of sonic tweaks and digressions, but they’re organized by the gated thwack of those Minneapolis drums, which cleave pockets of space around the songs so the hooks have room to breathe. Róisín doesn’t admit air as readily, at least not in these recordings, and its sense of intimacy prioritizes addition over subtraction: more soundclashy samples, more grain, more fingerprints on the canvas. On “K-Bar,” when Ciarán coos about how “we could both be girls,” you can almost see remnants of some other, bigger songs, hastily traced and then smudged away.

The mechanics of Ciarán’s sound can be clunky when outfitted for the small, melodramatic material he tends to write. “RED 99” vamps through a melody of just a few notes and a lovestruck vision of a car: “In my red ’99/Parked on the side.” To graduate from a stock concept to a real observation, picture-of-a-picture imagery like this asks for delicate framing. As Ciarán keeps singing the refrain, folds in maudlin strings and turns his “ecstatic vocal stacks” dial up to the max, it’s jarring, like encountering an unfamiliar prestige drama in the middle of its season finale. I can feel the height of the intrigue and it’s giving me vertigo: What is it about this car, these characters, that requires a fragged-out crescendo chorus?

Buried in Róisín is a great album in the spirit of Tirzah, Dawuna, or, like, Cody ChesnuTT, that would locate the organic vulnerability of the outsider in the surreal enclosure of the bedroom studio. “Loom” is loose and beautiful—it’s all about the gap that blooms between the kick drum and Ciarán’s looped breath, the threshold of different forms of physicality. His accent on the extended rap interlude “White Leather” provides rare evidence that he’s from the UK, and you might read Róisín’s heavy-lidded flux as a Burial– or Blunt-style preoccupation with how memory persists as texture. Mostly, it’s the same project that Ciarán and his friends have always pursued: writing songs without being too obvious about “writing songs,” and filling in their absences with pictorial detail. After all the lives he’s lived, all the gear and stories he’s amassed, Ciarán continues to linger somewhere else; Róisín is still searching for its home.