Sorcha Richardson shares new single “Ellen Forever”
New album Draw The Outline out 11th September via Faction Records
Dublin-born singer-songwriter Sorcha Richardson has shared a poignant new single titled “Ellen Forever”. The track is taken from her much-anticipated new album Draw The Outline – out 11th September via Faction Records.
With just two albums to her name, Richardson has been making a name for herself as one of Ireland’s most magnetic songwriters. The last few years have seen her on a remarkable ascent that includes landing a Choice Music Prize nomination for her debut album First Prize Bravery, before reaching a #4 position in the Official Irish Album Charts and topping the Irish Independent Albums Chart for its follow up Smiling Like An Idiot. In that time, she’s amassed more than 80 million streams, has earned fans in everyone from Chloe Grace-Moretz to Ellie Goulding, racked-up widespread plaudits from the likes of The Guardian and BBC Radio 6 Music, and toured around the world both as a headliner (including a packed-out Barbican show), and as a special guest for Mitski, Dodie, Villagers, Snow Patrol, and more.
Having debuted some new material last month in a blistering performance for Other Voices at St. James Church in Dingle, Richardson gave fans a first taste of the album proper with her confident and contemplative single “Grenadine”, which earned plaudits from the likes of NME, Consequence, DIY, Wonderland, Dork, The Line Of Best Fit, CLASH, and more. This was followed by lead single “Illinois Again”, which was released last month.
The new ruminative new single “Ellen Forever” sits at the heart of the new album’s introspective nature, exploring self-esteem, autonomy, and friendship. Co-written with Bridie Monds Watson (SOAK), the track sees Sorcha ruminate about an unassumingly powerful conversation with a friend over rolling fingerpicking and subtle double bass.
Speaking on the single, Richardson says, “I wrote ‘Ellen Forever’ after a casual but very confronting conversation with my friend Ellen, after she asked me how writing was going for my album. Sometimes someone else telling you that you’re doing well is the most alienating thing to hear in the world. It sent me into a bit of a spiral about wanting to express myself and feel understood, but not being quite sure about how much of myself and my life to share in order to get there. I said goodbye and wrote half the song on the way home.
It became kind of a central pillar to the album and this feeling of being scared to let someone in, or share too much of yourself, knowing that once you pull that on that thread the whole thing might unravel way beyond your control. I wrote a lot of it with my friend SOAK, and we laughed so much the day we wrote it. It was a great reminder that sometimes your friends can see you more clearly than you can see yourself, and songs can be both serious and funny at the same time.””
Sorcha’s complex and tender harmonies are the exact thing you need to immerse yourself in, and with the new single, you fall into the lure of this intricate piece. Embrace the emotion that resonates from the vocal notes and the resonating guitar strings. The emotive power of the new single captures this lightness through the contrasting tones and an air of sweeter symphonies.
With Draw The Outline, Sorcha Richardson leans into the softness of abstraction. Originally from Dublin, Richardson spent nearly a decade living in New York before returning to Ireland, eventually moving from Dublin to West Kerry a couple of years ago. The latter is a place shaped by quiet, at the foot of a mountain and a short walk from the sea, where life moves at a slower pace. In that stillness, the album gradually took form. It was, as she puts it, “a nice place to be.” Moving outside of the metropolis noise, Richardson discovered that life’s fervency exists in a different form. Musically, it might play at lower volume, while poetically, it reveals itself in unassuming moments like swimming in August sunlight or illuminating car rides – fleeting scenes that glow quietly within.
Following the release of 2022’s Smiling Like an Idiot and an extensive period of touring, particularly in the U.S., Richardson found herself veering towards burnout. She was intent on making a third album but knew she needed to allow herself a different pace. Working from a small bedroom in Kerry, she often found herself unable to write directly. Songs emerged sideways, on long walks, on drives without headphones, in the space created by stepping away. It became a process of circling ideas rather than confronting them head-on, of allowing things to surface without forcing them into shape. The urge to define or explain softened. Her work became less direct, but closer to the truth.
A quiet tension runs throughout the album, a desire to be understood set against an uncertainty about how much of oneself needs to offer to get there. Questions of intimacy versus perception, and vulnerability versus humiliation, surface again and again: how two people can experience the same moment differently, or how loneliness arrives unexpectedly at the awareness of being misunderstood.
Writing these songs, she loosened her grip on structures she’d relied on, moving away from linear, narrative-driven writing towards something more nebulous and fluid. “A lot of my previous stuff is me observing other people’s conversations, or me observing my conversations with other people. A lot of this album is me observing my conversations within my own head,” she says. “There’s a surreal, dream-like quality to it. It moves between me here in the room with you now and then, all of the things that my brain is throwing up to me; fears, memories, imagined outcomes.”Draw The Outline interrogates why she’s drawn to share some things and eager to withhold others.
The songs here don’t build toward obvious climaxes. They expand gently, spiral outward like nautilus shells. Moving away from the synthesizers that defined her earlier work, Sorcha found a new intimacy in the “subtle, textural imperfections” of woodwinds, saxophone, Hammond organ and piano; throughout, acoustic guitar acts as a quiet anchor, holding these drifting reflections in place. Influenced by the approach of artists like Feist and Aldous Harding, the production – by Chris W Ryan (Chalk, Just Mustard, New Dad) – feels like a super-magnified lens placed over a vast, blurry landscape. She was inspired in part by the intimacy of small performances—she recalls seeing Laura Marling do a set in a church at Other Voices Festival.
Draw The Outline finds confidence, peace, and even a quiet sense of hope in abstraction. There’s something defiant and profound in its refusal to weave the seams tightly, instead embracing openness as a way of staying present, attentive, and alive to what unfolds. It doesn’t seek to define so much as to hold space, for uncertainty, for contradiction, for the quiet expansion of thought. “‘Draw the Outline,’ to me, is kind of an instruction to start without needing to know where you’re going.” Lonely at times but never without warmth, the album carries a gentle insistence on empathy, and on the possibility that not knowing can be its own kind of clarity.
Tracklisting:
1. Sea Pink Moon
2. Grenadine
3. Fake Venice
4. Illinois Again
5. Ellen Forever
6. Dog’s Best Man
7. Adam (Pacing in the Park)
8. The Orchard
9. Sunshine Season
10.The Video
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