Return home allows April to flourish in all seasons
Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell
April Lawlor, best known mononymously as April, has been a bubbling voice in Irish indie-pop for years. Though she grew up in Kilcullen, Co Kildare, April’s mother comes from Clifden, and she spends plenty of time there and in Roundstone. A singer/songwriter and producer, April orchestrates lush, sophisticated music from her bedroom, mostly using Garageband and an iPad to capture her ideas.
That was the initial formula for her latest EP, An Axe to Grind, which arrived in late July. Seven tracks long, it is a project laced with introspection – these songs began to emerge as April closed a turbulent and difficult chapter in her personal and working life.
“It was a time when a lot of things were changing for me,” she says. “I was living over in London, and I had signed a deal with Atlantic Records in 2022. I was with them for a little bit over a year and it was an interesting experience. I was making very different music than I wanted to be making.
“Towards the end of the relationship with the label, I just wasn’t feeling myself and I was feeling very disconnected from making music. I wasn’t doing well with the promoting side of it and having to be on social media a lot.
“I was just struggling to be part of that major music industry side of things.”
Atlantic dropped April at the end of 2022 and, around the same time, she let go of her manager. Having long been used to working as part of a team, she was thrust into self-sufficiency. To compile the sea change, her romantic partner broke up with her, leaving April to “sit with [her] feelings and deal with all this at once.”
“I found the joy of making music by myself again. I had gotten so used to being in rooms with producers and writers. Now I was back to basics in my bedroom with my iPad and a guitar. I wrote poems and very basic songs with no intention of anyone hearing them. I was doing it for myself.”
Through Instagram, April connected with Hayley Briasco, better known by the moniker Kim Tee – a musician and producer who has worked with the likes of Dominic Fike and Clairo.
Pictured: April...Galway’s connections.