Sargent House are the label in charge for bringing And So I Watch You From Afar and Adebisi Shank to North America and for their first podcast, Ireland’s Niamh Hegarty is at the helm to return the favour by introducing some of Sargent’s roster in return.
The focus is on Sargent’s SXSW showcase next month…

De La Soul’s Plug One and Plug Two, aka Deen Whitter and Jacob ‘Pop Life’ Barrow have a side-project entitled First Serve where they are indulging their goofy pop side. ‘Must B The Music’ is the debut single from it out on March 23rd with the album First Serve out the following week.
The pair…

Madonna has a pretty high opinion of herself these days. Last week she was asked about her ticket prices for the world tour which was revealed this morning…
“Start saving your pennies now,” she said. “People spend $300 on crazy things all the time, things like handbags. So work all year, scrape the money together,…

Watching a new Madonna video in 2012 certainly feels like a step into another era. ‘Give Me Your Luvin’ is a fairly standard fluffy track with Madonna sounding a bit weak and a nod to “dubstep”. Let’s face it, nothing we say here is going to matter a jot because it’s Madonna and this is…

Last month, we offered you a live stream of Florence + The Machine’s gig from The Hackney Empire in London.
Now with Ceremonials… well on the way to big things once again, it’s time to revisit the gig.
Check out the live rendition of ‘Say My Name’ from Hackey that night…
You can read our

State dropped its Faces of 2012 digital mag last week, but if you’re looking for something a little more historic than you can check out Tony Clayton-Lea’s book 101 Irish Records You Must Hear…, a guide to some Irish albums down the decades that Mr Clayton-Lea reckons you have to hear. It includes U2,

Young four-piece Hush War Cry all met while studying Architecture in college together in Cork. Their delicate, nuanced sound is already frightfully well developed. Rich arrangements of guitar, piano and subtleties recall the ornate histrionics of Wild Beasts. The Apparitions EP out this month will be the world’s first taste of these promising young learned…

Painting home truths and realistic skies from the suburbs of Dublin, Lethal Dialect represents the more traditional line of colloquial rap music in Ireland. There’s no bravado here, just great rap tunes relatable to anybody living in a post Celtic Tiger era. That’d be all of us then. Last year, Lethal Dialect released the best…

Lecs Luther is a contentious addition to the Irish rap scene for those engaged with it. Arguments against him boil down to the fact that there’s not much of an Irish identity to him. His debut music video was shot in Brighton and he doesn’t rap in a discernible Irish accent, favouring the voices of…

Lemonada makes instrumental beat tapes when studying music production in a Dublin college. His first collection entitled Kelly Green Volume 1…, released in August of 2011 was an impressive introduction to his Cassette Boy meets cut and paste sample-heavy style and remixes for The Cyclist, Nouveaunoise and Gorgeous Colours along with a couple of

While many of the choices on the Faces of 2012 list are in their early phases of their creative careers, Jack Colleran has already had an unexpected year that has seen him become one of the most promising new electronic artists, not just in Ireland, but worldwide. In little over a year, Newbridge, Kildare-born Colleran…

Dim Mak head honcho and “alternative celebrity DJ” Steve Aoki is lined up to play The Academy on March 31st. Tickets are €29 plus fees on sale next Friday January 13th.
Aoki has an album out on January which features guests Lil Jon, Rivers Cuomo, Sky Ferreira, Chiddy Bang, Travis Barker, Kele of Bloc Party,…

After last year’s long weekend of fun, the Ones To Watch festival is back again next week in Whelan’s and The Village from 11th to the 14th of January for four full days. Showcasing the best in new Irish music, Tickets are €5 per day or €10 for a full festival ticke with a free…

We have a small pool of film writers at State so compiling this list was a lot easier than collating the 40 people who submitted to the top albums of 2011 list. Our intention here is to represent a tasty selection of films you may have missed if you didn’t got the cinema as regularly…