Lankum Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin ★★★★★ There’s something wonderfully far-fetched about the rise of Lankum . The Dublin band inhabit an eerie hinterland between 19th-century Irish folk and experimental drone music. Neither are exactly blockbuster genres.
And yet here they are, headlining their own festival on the heels of a Mercury Prize nomination for their fourth critically lauded fourth album, False Lankum. It’s an inspiring story, and the quartet of Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada seem moved by the warm reception they receive as the sun sets and a chill creeps over Kilmainham. Announcing they have a dislike for playing festivals – they’ve just come from Primavera in Barcelona, where they shared the bill with Lana Del Rey and SZA – they add that they are delighted to make an exception for In The Meadows, where the line-up, hand-picked by Lankum, includes Dublin singer John Francis Flynn and indie veterans Mogwai.
Yet for all Lankum’s protestations to the contrary, the sweep and scale of an outdoor stage is a perfect fit for their “mutant folk”. They’re straight into the heavy stuff with the throbbing Go Dig My Grave – a cousin once removed to the 17th-century murder ballad, Barbara Allen, as covered by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Art Garfunkel (and, in a 1951 Warner Brothers cartoon, Porky Pig). READ MORE ‘I hugged my kids and had a Guinness at the finish line’: Meet the woman who smashed the record for running .