“Modern Mythologies” - David Keenan
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
With Modern Mythologies, David Keenan doesn’t just return — he detonates. He opens his chest cavity, shakes out the ghosts, burns the old stories and rewrites them in real time. The album, arriving 21 November 2025, is a sprawling, intimate tapestry of memories, myth-making and survival. It’s Keenan at his most exposed and his most expansive: a poet documenting the messy miracle of being alive.
Across three years of writing, Keenan has turned his life into an anthology — not a greatest-hits victory lap, but a lived-in, tear-stained notebook of everything that nearly broke him and everything that saved him. Addiction, childhood residue, small-town characters, city wanderings, love, lust, fear, hope — it’s all here, woven with the instinct of someone raised inside the Irish storytelling tradition but living in the hyper-modern blur of memes, chaos and digital mythology. He’s essentially asking: What does a folk hero look like in the age of Instagram, anxiety and algorithmic doomscrolling?
And somehow, Keenan answers it with a record that’s both ancient and neon-lit.
The songs feel like short stories overheard in pubs or scribbled on buses, each one shaped by survival, self-confrontation, and the tender reckoning that comes from getting out of your own way. Tracks like Amelioration simmer with domestic tension; 50 Quid Man swaggers between satire and desperation; Suriname or Bust is a tragicomic ode to dreamers who know the odds are bad but bet anyway. There’s something cinematic yet scruffy about it all, as if Keenan pressed record while standing dead-centre in the hurricane of his own life.
But the gravitational centre of the album is Incandescent Morning, an almost spiritual six-minute slow-burner that glows with erotic devotion. It’s Keenan stepping fully into vulnerability, singing with a kind of raw holiness that makes the track feel both confessional and transcendent. It’s an exhale, a surrender, an offering. The whole song smoulders with the feeling of two people building a church out of each other’s softness.
Much of the album sits in that gorgeous contradiction: gritty but tender, bruised but hopeful, heavy but somehow still playful. Keenan admits he wrote many of these songs while wading through addiction, using creativity as a rope to pull himself back toward daylight. There’s an undeniable sense of rebellion against despair running through the record — a refusal to stay broken, a belief that humour and silliness can stand shoulder to shoulder with fear and doubt.
The band — long-time collaborators like Dylan Lynch, Conor Cunningham, Lughaidh Armstrong Mayock, and co-producers Gavin Glass, Peter Baldwin and Cian Synnott — build an atmosphere that’s intimate yet sweeping, shifting from Irish Gothic grit to soft piano balladry to groove-driven spoken-word vignettes. Nothing feels forced. Nothing repeats itself. It’s alive, curious, restless.
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
The bonus tracks deepen the world even further. Love Letter to a Drunken Angel is Keenan at his most compassionate; Reapergrim — a standout — is a painfully honest, oddly playful portrait of staying sober at a party while your brain invents monsters. If you’ve ever hovered at the edge of a room trying to stay in your body, this one hits hard.
By the time Sick & Tired closes the record, Keenan has circled back to something like clarity — not tidy resolution, but earned perspective. He’s not the boy he was, not the addict he was, not the man dragging the ghosts behind him. He’s something new, and the album doesn’t just document that transformation — it enacts it.
In the end, Modern Mythologies feels like a challenge issued directly to the listener: write your own story down; confront it; celebrate it; mythologise it on your own terms. Keenan has done just that, pouring guts and imagination into a record that refuses to be numb or detached. It is flawed, inspired, deeply human — and that’s exactly what makes it unforgettable.
If music is a mirror, this album doesn’t show you a polished reflection. It shows you the cracked glass — the part that lets the light through.
“Modern Mythologies” is available now on all major streaming platforms
