Susan has spent the last few years honing her craft as a solo performer. A songwriter of hidden depths, with a timeless voice that is equal parts balm and blowtorch, she is audacity personified, a free spirit, a real performer.

Since the release of the critically acclaimed collaboration album with Mick Flannery ‘In The Game’, Susan has toured extensively across Europe and North America, performing both with Mick and solo on headline tours, festival stages, and as an invited guest to an array of artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Calexico, Jamie Cullum, Valerie June and The Teskey Brothers.

Described already by Clash as “Superb” and the Sunday Times as simply “Exquisite” alongside previous nominations for the RTE Radio 1 ‘Best Female Folk Artist’ and the Choice Music Prize. Susan's new album Now in a Minute out in September 2024 has already described Susan as a “Artist working at the top of her game..” and “A wondrous showcase of O’Neill’s bubbling creative prowess” (Hotpress)

Although only her second album, Susan O’Neill’s Now in a Minute, is one of the most highly anticipated albums of the year. It does not disappoint - vulnerable but strong, dark but hopeful, it confirms Susan O’Neill as a fascinating and gifted new voice in music.

Susan studied music in Waterford, in Ireland's South East. As is so often the case, it was the relationships built in this time that proved most significant. College friends and multi-instrumentalists Cillian and Lorcan Byrne are key players and writers on Now in a Minute. It was Susan’s mother that started the ball rolling, who’d have thought that a plastic toy microphone passed from a mother to a child would lead to one of the biggest Irish albums of 2021, In the Game, and sell out shows across Europe and America.

After spending years honing her writing and solo performances, Susan was invited to join as a guest vocalist touring with electronic dance band ‘King Kong Company,’ as well as with Irish traditional music legend Sharon Shannon. The ease with which Susan collaborated with two seemingly polar opposite genres stands as a testament to her versatility as a musician and performer.

Susan had been touring with these artists as well as picking up her own debut solo shows when she was asked to support Mick Flannery on a night in Galway. The two ended the show with a duet of a John Prine song. The alchemy when their voices came together was astonishing. It suggested new worlds, new vistas for both.

Covid may have darkened every stage in Ireland, but lockdown and isolation gave Susan and Mick the time to write an album together. That album, In the Game, was a triumph. A concept album set in a fracturing relationship, it allowed them the freedom to explore the passions of this doomed couple.

Liberating for them, mesmerising for us, it was music’s hottest ticket.

“There were so many incredible experiences,” says Susan, “playing with the RTE Concert Orchestra. I was grateful, day by day. It shaped me, it didn’t feel like work. As a concept album, I was able to get into the heart of the character, I was able to show a more vulnerable side, be super tender, which I hadn’t before. “

And there was writing with Mick Flannery: “It was a beautiful, insightful, experience. It was wonderous to share his musical mind.” In The Game would become Ireland's biggest selling independent album of 2021.

All of that experience, the writing, the performance and more is brought to bear on Now in a Minute. It has been 3 short years since In The Game, and yet it is an eternity away. “Well,” says Susan, “time is a spiral. You can be closer to something from ten years ago than you are to yesterday.”

If you think that sounds like the words of someone who is content sitting with solitude and their feelings, you are correct. That is a huge part of what informs this album. “The character from In the Game is gone. I wanted to scare myself, try something new. This is personal, honest, and vulnerable.”

The result is an album that brims with darkness and light, passions that burn and consume, chaos and solitude, brave journeys towards freedom, beautiful, crucial connections with others and that thin thread of hope that lifts the heaviness within.

Four of these songs (Tijuana, Lilt, Everyone's Blind and Too Many Ways) are co-writes with Mick Flannery, but the others reunite Susan with Cillian and Lorcan Byrne, with production by Christian Best.

“It was great to work with them again, they’ve grown so much musically. There’s a moment playing together when you feel like the engine is revving, the telepathy is working, it’s so quick. There are nerves, excitement, and fun. There are infinite possibilities.”

“Writing entails dreaming up songs. There is self-expression and practice but then you have to deliver them to people, and that involves neon lights, hi-res amps, smoke and mirrors, and you have to trust the process, and I trust them, totally.”

That process is working wonderfully.

From the ethereal Apparitions (“Sitting with darkness inside yourself, unafraid to acknowledge the depths, but saluting that thread of hope you find at the bottom”) to the driving Lilt (“a feminine salute to the journey of countless women that had a need to flee.”)

Drive (“it fell out of my mouth and onto the page in one brief sitting!”) bristles with intent, Everyone’s Blind (“a melody rose up as easily as breathing”) casts longing eyes homeward and Give You My All (“for my niece and nephews, it’s about passing on the love, wisdom and kindness”) can’t help but lift the spirit. The haunting ‘Malachi’ an ode to older times, and young friends lost. It’s a ballad for the ages, a real heart wrench. A song of honesty that’s not afraid to lean in.

All of the songs are enriched by the at times astonishing vocal harmonies. They soar, they swoop, they elevate. “Harmony decides everything,” says Susan, “that unity of voice is medicine. When you get to sing with another person, it's like a Gospel.”

And Gospel it is, from beginning to end. Songs that will lift and nourish you. It’s hard to believe this is only Susan’s second album. The development is startling.

Your fan, Tom Dunne