The Coronas Take Us Track-By-Track Through Their New LP

Dublin trio The Coronas have today unveiled their glorious eighth studio album, Thoughts & Observations, a 12 track trove of captivating indie-pop-rock gems centred around themes of “love, loss and growing older”.

To celebrate the record’s arrival and their imminent live return to Australia this November (peep those dates at the bottom of the page), The Coronas frontman Danny O’Reilly has treated us to an exclusive track-by-track rundown of the band’s freshly-minted LP. Stream Thoughts & Observations in full, and read what Danny has to say about each track off the record, down below.

The Coronas – Thoughts & Observations

1.’Speak Up’

One of the first songs that we wrote for the record, it felt immediately like an album opener. The song is an uplifting cry for help and guidance. When something doesn’t feel right in a relationship, is it ok to ask the other person ‘are you having these doubts too?’

We really wanted it to grow sonically from an intimate and delicate 1st verse to a huge moment in the 3rd chorus when it jumps out of the speakers, but with real, organic instruments with little or no synthesisers or programming.

2. ‘If You’re Going’

A song that really came together in the studio in London. We recorded the album in Eastcote Studios, in west London with our long time producer/collaborator George Murphy. George has worked with so many amazing acts – Mumford and Sons, Ellie Goulding, The Specials and many others. He’s so versatile as a producer and created the electro percussion loop that sits underneath the whole track one morning in about 30 minutes. The loop became the backbone and feel of the whole song, inspired by late 90’s/early 00’s acts like Moby on his Play album.

3. ‘Confirmation’ Ft. Jamie Duffy

Sometimes songs are written in an hour or less but sometimes, like with Confirmation, they go on a bit of a journey. Initially I worked on the backing track with two of my talented Irish musician/producers friends – Cormac Butler and Cian MacSweeny. But I decided not to attempt to write the lyrics until later. The initial demo just had some random jibberish. I sat down and took my time with the lyrics, as I felt the tone and imagery was important to the track’s journey. Cian had played a type of classical piano part on the demo but I had just read an article about this young talented virtuoso piano player from Monaghan called Jamie Duffy who had played with friends of mine, a band called Kingfishr, and I reached out to him. Thankfully Jamie was happy to feature on the song and played a gorgeous piano part. A side note, it wasn’t actually a Starbucks receipt that was spotted in real life but I didn’t think “I spotted an overpriced hipster coffee shop receipt” had the same ring to it!

4. ‘Still On Your Good Side’

This was written like most of the album in Dingle, Co. Kerry in the south west corner of Ireland. Lar Kaye, our amazing live guitar player and collaborator had sent me a drum loop which I solo-ed and wrote the song around. Conor (our drummer) and Knoxy (our bass player) were in Dingle with me as I was working on it and were very involved in the arrangement and journey of the song. Sometimes I like working on early demos by myself as there can be an embarrassing amount of ‘swings and misses’ before I actually get to something that I think is kinda cool but this time it was lovely to have the boys behind me in studio saying they liked this or that as the song was being written. Lyrically it’s about the morning after the night before, when you wake up and sheepishly try to reconnect with your other half.

5. ‘That’s Exactly What Love Is’ Ft. Gabrielle Aplin

This song was written as a duet, a conversation almost. The original demo had me singing the female part in soft falsetto, but I knew straight away Gabreille’s voice would be amazing on the track. In fact, I bumped into her at a festival in September 2022, about a week after the first demo was recorded, and mentioned it to her then. When she came into to studio to record the proper version, over 12 months later, she floored us all in the control room. Her performance is incredible. I suppose there’s a lot of emotion and trauma in the lyrics, from both points of view. Trying to sing about myself through the eyes of someone else was cathartic and something I’d never done before. The original demo was quite produced and programmed with blips and blops and weird sounds but our producer George saw that the emotion of the song would be much better served if we approached it more organically and subtlety, and of course, he was correct.

6. ‘Ghosting’

Ghosting, to my mind, begins the back half of the album, from here on out it’s a bit more positive and perhaps less depressing! It’s about that time, early in a relationship, when you realise that you haven’t picked up your phone all day. You look at it eventually, see that you’ve got messages, emails and texts but you’re happier just putting it away to spend more time with the person you’re with. In a time of relentless scrolling and being so contactable all the time, that feeling is a breath of fresh air, and a nice realisation of what this person that you’re with means to you. I like that verse 1 and 2 are completely different melodies, something that we don’t do too often.

7. ‘Singing Just For You (On Occasion)’

When I sat down to start writing the album, it took me a little while to get going. Lyrically if I’m struggling to get started I often write about that exact thing – songs about trying to write. That’s how the verses in this song came about. It was a cold and dark and miserable in Dublin so I left and set up my little mobile studio in Dingle. Musically it was born from a loop that Lar sent me over email and I did a rough demo until I brought it to the band. We fleshed it out with George and the song became what it is today.

8. ‘Crowded Room’

Another song that was born out of a loop that Lar sent to me. Often I struggle to get started with a total blank canvas, so I’d been encouraging Lar to just send me ambiance or loops as he is so talented and prolific at writing cool sounding scene-setters. When we got to the studio with George eventually, we approached the song much more acoustically and organically, which is a constant thread throughout the album really, with plucking acoustic guitars and backing vocals. Lyrically it’s about a night out after a show where everything else fades to the background as you can’t stop thinking about one person who was there.

9. ‘Good Boy’

This song went through a lot of arrangement changes as we worked in pre-production with George, but at the end of it all we decided to keep the really rough low-fi intro that was recorded really roughly on garage band on my laptop at the very beginning. It had something in it that we couldn’t recreate. The song is about that moment when your friends are telling you that it’s time to start trying to get back on the dating scene after a break-up, something that gets more daunting as you get older.

10. ‘At Least She’s Laughing’

We wanted to have a song on the album that didn’t follow the traditional verse-chorus arrangement but was more of a attack on the senses, with the loud trumpets and unusual drum patterns to the front. It was a lot of fun working it out in the studio. Lyrically it’s simply about the confusion of actually trying to ask someone out, and being able to laugh at the awkwardness of it all.

11. ‘Unbelievable Scenes’

A song that took us a while to work out in studio. We tried a few different things with it but in the end we approached it simply with the sentiment of the song to the front. A groovy bassline in chorus 2 from Knoxy really brought the back half of the song together. “The hack of me” is an Irish saying (I think!) basically meaning I don’t look very good!

12. ‘Hearts For Eyes’

The song was written quickly, in one sitting pretty much, the week Burt Bacharach passed away. I decided to a borrow couple of his jazzy, lounge music chords and try write a very honest love song. That feeling of lying beside your other half as they fall asleep and you’re looking at them feeling tragically obsessed with everything about them, and there’s nothing you can do about it, it almost seems unfair.

Initially we were going to keep it super simple, with just piano and vocal, but then we decided to try something different with the second half of the song – an old school big band/jazz orchestra type vibe. Conor’s drum fill into the back half is so perfect and we just knew it had to be the closing track on the album.