PILLOW QUEENS Name Your Sorrow H H H H Royal Mountain

• Published date: 11 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Pillow Queens’ third album is an exception, the sound of musicians and songwriters sliding into a zone where things are about to take off. If we had thought their earlier albums – In Waiting, from 2020, and Leave the Light On, from 2022 – had defined the band in sound and scope to the point where not much needed to be changed, we were wrong. Name Your Sorrow is like the Starship Enterprise heading for warp factor one

Leave the Light On referenced Bluets, the American writer Maggie Nelson’s book of prose poems, from 2009. Similarly, Name Your Sorrow is partly inspired by Atlantis: A Lost Sonnet, by the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (“the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it”).

The album’s dozen songs frame such involvement...