After the critical success of her debut, the Choice Music Prize nominated Personal History (2020), and sophomore album Endless Affair (2023), Dublin-born, London-based Ailbhe Reddy returns with an album about endings, beginnings and all the chaotic beauty in between.
To Ailbhe Reddy, Kiss Big means carpe diem. Taken from the album’s “true blue romantic song,” the call to “Kiss Big” tells us to grab life by its unresolved emotions. Her third album gives these emotions a sound – a blend of honest lyricism, melodious guitar, and the tell-tale ambivalence of synths. Reddy knows how to keep it simple without making it plain. Crucial to her songwriting is a total lack of interest in the either/ors of a surface-level existence. In the grey areas, the “messy middle” in Reddy’s words, you’ll find the most possibilities. Like the bridge of “Kiss Big,” when you stop looking for easy explanations or solutions, you’ll end up with a series of “ands.”
Kiss Big opens with “Align”, Reddy’s voice resonant above a uniform pulse, mirroring her train journey: “I see you in my train window, in the reflection.” This is the theme of her album, moving forward and careening back at the same time, trying to balance your maturity with your unrestricted feelings of loss. Reddy actually wrote “Align” on a train, messing around with synths on her laptop. The sound was influenced by some of her favourite bands from her teens, another balance of looking back and moving forward: “I was listening to loads of songs from my teens and my early 20s, Beach House and Arcade Fire, I wanted to echo that mix of synths and acoustic for ‘Align.’ […] I just like that mix. I probably demoed some of the songs five or six times.”
Though the demo process was arduous, the album tumbled out of Reddy in a somewhat given form: “The track listing is the way it was written chronologically […] that wasn’t on purpose. I rearranged it a thousand different times to make it sit differently.” The album follows a post-breakup cycle of grief, going from mature reflection, to total despair, and back to love again. Reddy doesn’t feel trapped by this cycle, the album is structured to encourage repeat listenings, the return of themes again and again just another imperative to repeat: “People are eternally optimistic when it comes to romantic love in a way that I find very silly but also very sweet.” On “Gorgeous Thing,” the song and the album climaxes in a fanfare to recurring mistakes. Reddy joyfully exclaims “I’d do it all again” as the guitar wails a pyrrhic melody.
Lead single, ‘So Quickly, Baby’ does in miniature what the album achieves as a whole. The verses are measured with a steady tempo and sensible lyrics, that is until the chorus crashes in, all neuroticism and agony. Reddy starts howling the impossible question: “How do you move on so quickly, baby?” That “baby” being the blow of unrequited tenderness, a little comma to exaggerate the gap. The song oscillates between emotions, Reddy knowing how she should behave in contrast to how she actually feels. Neatly packaged in the melodramatic, yet totally believable, feeling that “for you to live, why do I have to be dead?”
Reddy was intentionally over-the-top on this song, but that’s not always how it’s received: “So Quickly Baby is really tongue in cheek, and people are always saying that it’s so sad, so heartbreaking. To me, the verses are “I’m trying to really accept this, and I wish you all the best” and then the choruses are that kind of really neurotic “I’ve lost the breakup.” It’s almost a bit petulant.” Reddy spoke about how music changes once it’s released into the world: “By the time that you’ve played a song enough, it doesn’t even feel like your thing anymore. I think songwriting would be impossible if people couldn’t project their own experiences onto it. Sometimes you get the odd DM where you’re like, whoa, that’s absolutely not what that song’s about. But you do you.”
It’s no surprise that people read themselves into Reddy’s music, she has a way of making inexplicable feelings accessible. When I asked her how she wrote confusion so well she said: “I don’t know how other songwriters feel, but I find that you’re putting a bridle on your unconscious. You’re taking all these messy, multicolored strings out of your head, and songs almost make sense of them.” Reddy’s music lingers in the messiness of human experience because songwriting is her way of expressing that in her own life: “If I didn’t write songs, I would so often be stuck in that middle section of confusion and sadness […] Songs help bring you to an end point.”
Her searches for self-discovery tend to start with images; exes in a bar (That Girl), an old dress (Align), the intimacy of a basement bedroom (Gorgeous Thing). These personal stills hold people in particular moments, the act of remembering becoming the recovery of a lost self.
This self is heavily linked to the experiences of women, especially queer women, in their thirties. Reddy is invested in supporting women’s experiences in music: “When I started doing open mics and cutting my teeth in the industry, there were no women. There were definitely no queer women, well we were few and far between.”
On “Graceful Swimmer” Reddy collaborates with another champion of Irish female musicians, Maykay. “She’s actually just one of the best people […] I have never met someone who is so charismatic and who chooses to be extremely, extremely, generous with it.” Maykay’s slightly deeper voice steadies the song, breathing in the background as Reddy praises her partner’s elegant existence.
“I was impressed by your heroism when you got into swim […] you didn’t even flinch.” Reddy’s reflections were partly inspired by Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which explores the very different experiences women have of relationships in their 30s: “You know, this worry of losing yourself as a mother, losing yourself as a woman in your 30s, putting your own dreams on hold to focus on romantic love. I was inspired by her exploration of how you don’t leave a relationship because of the other person. Really, most of the time, you leave it because you’re trying to find the person you were when you met them. You end up blaming your partner for this disappearance but you chose that life. It’s that ambiguity that people feel at a certain point about the choices they’ve made.”
Reddy explores this idea most obviously in “That Girl.” It starts with a racing synth heartbeat, quickened in comparison to the opening of “Align”. It’s full of anxiety and anticipation, “your hands on my face and my shaking leg,” guitars hemming and hawing over her hesitant pleads. Reddy is trying to convince her ex-partner that the girl they fell in love with is still there. The song swerves at the end with Reddy almost whispering “I’ve never been further from you than I am now” before the rest of the band cascades in as she repeats “and now, and now.”
Though the “you” Reddy refers to is her ex-partner, it also refers to herself, “For me, that song is about trying to go back to a version of yourself and realizing that that’s actually impossible. And with every minute that passes, you are further away from that girl that you were and you will always be moving further and further away from her, and you need to accept that.”
Reddy’s clamouring “and now” is the sound of time slipping, the irretrievable loss of any and every moment. As comforting as it is to think of death as a natural form of change, Reddy shows that change is also a natural kind of death. Reddy uses the cyclical states of falling in and out of love the same way she uses kiss big as a call for vitality, a small example of a larger pattern that can govern a life, “that’s what [That Girl] is about through the lens of a relationship, right? But that’s just the lens. That’s not the whole story.”
Kiss Big really grieves the process of becoming estranged from your own memories by the unyielding reality of a person. This manifests as their ex-partner moving on and changing, “You seem different to how I remember” (Untangling), “I barely recognise you now” (So, Quickly Baby). However, the lyrics could as easily apply to any number of situations, especially Reddy’s past self.
Reddy has experienced this firsthand, as her past self remains crystallised and accessible in the form of her previous albums, Personal History (2020) and Endless Affair (2023). These versions of herself are so far removed from the current Reddy that she has trouble sometimes recognising her own voice: “I had a song that a friend of mine found that we had demoed together when I was 21 maybe 22 and I genuinely said, this isn’t me.” Even with her more famous released tracks, Reddy finds it difficult to relate to them.
“When I hear “Distrust,” back the voice doesn’t really sound like me anymore. My voice obviously has gotten deeper with age […] But also I wrote that song when I was 22, I’m 34 now, none of those lyrics relate to me or my life, or how I feel about anything anymore. I talk about that all the time, it’s like reading an old diary and I don’t keep a diary. Don’t need to obviously.” This uncanniness only highlights the effects of change, Reddy’s voice is deeper and more secure with time. Something which surely bodes well for the future.
During the interview, I struggled to associate the heartbroken Reddy of the album and the charismatic Reddy of my screen. It was only when I listened back to Kiss Big that I realised that there was no inconsistency there. Kiss Big has been, in some ways, platitudinously called a break-up/heartbreak album. Yet, the level of personal insight the album displays goes far beyond the limits of a relationship. This could not be done by someone without a sense of humour or some charm.
In the final few minutes of our interview Reddy proved my point. We were talking about the album cover, the result of an informal photoshoot in a friend’s backgarden. It features two of Reddy’s friends kissing, zoomed in on their cheeks and lips. The photo is all over Dublin, especially blown out of proportion on the bizarre projection wall above Grogan’s. Reddy laughed about it and jokingly said, “I was just using the album as a vehicle to put up pictures of girls kissing all over the city.”
Kiss Big now a big kiss, intimacy projected to the public, Reddy has tangled opposites together into a gorgeously messy middle you’d happily experience all over again.
Words: Éle Ní Chonbhuí
Image Credits: Su Mustecaplioglu
Kiss Big is out now on Don Giovanni Records.
Ailbhe Reddy plays The Button Factory, Dublin on 8th May 2026. Tickets are on sale now at singularartists.ie
