Chasing Abbey

A music teacher, a radio competition and a shed

Chasing Abbey are Ronan Bell, Jonathan Byrne and Ted Conway, from Tullamore in County Offaly. The grouping was not their idea. Conway and Byrne were in the same secondary-school class, Bell a year below, and a music teacher paired them off to enter a radio competition. They have been working together ever since, formalising the band in 2016 and producing everything themselves at their own set-up in the town — a shed studio, as Conway has described it, operating under the name Penthouse Productions.

The method has stayed deliberately loose. Rather than sitting down to write to a brief, the three jam and let the room dictate, with Conway describing the aim as a subconscious flow state rather than anything worked out in advance. That matters to how the records sound: the Irish instrumentation is not an overdub layered onto a finished dance track, it tends to be the thing the track was built around.

The singles decade

The debut single, That Good Thing, arrived in 2016 and became the most Shazamed song in Ireland. It topped the Irish iTunes chart, passed a million Spotify plays and won Song of the Year at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize, voted for by the public and announced at Vicar Street in Dublin on 9 March 2018, ahead of a shortlist that included Niall Horan and The Script. On the back of it the trio signed with 3 Beat in the UK and Universal Music Group. Their follow-up single was adopted by the Football Association of Ireland as an official track.

The 2019 EP The Odyssey Project went in at number one on the Irish music chart, and Billboard called them a juggernaut trio from Ireland. The commercial step up came in 2023 with Oh My Johnny (Banks of the Roses), which reached the Irish top ten, went platinum and gathered more than 2.1 million streams in Ireland alone. That track prompted a worldwide deal with Warner Music and Spinnin' Records, and was followed by Learning to Dance (Lanigan's Ball) in the same vein — a trad melody everybody in the room already knows, rebuilt over a four-to-the-floor arrangement.

What is unusual is how long the band went without an album. Platinum certifications, a million-plus social following and sold-out Irish rooms all arrived before any long-form record existed.

Cyber Celt

The debut album came out on 18 September 2026, announced earlier in the year with the single Seachain — Irish for watch out. The band's own gloss on the title is that it describes both the music and a working philosophy: the coming together of ancient and modern. Seachain itself was written about the volume of conflict and atrocity now routinely consumed on a phone. The band's framing was blunt: never before have so many people consumed so much trauma, and the song is meant as a reminder never to allow evil to be normalised.

The record is split between English and Gaeilge, and the Irish-language tracks carry much of its argument. Gorta deals with hunger and famine, T.a.L takes its title from tiocfaidh ár lá, and Íorónta turns on irony; elsewhere there are Mar Sin, Scartha, Culchie, Seán Tír, Saoirse, Colonised Minds, Arís Is Arís and Greedy Pigs, the last of those aimed squarely at profiteering.

At The Barrier, reviewing on 23 September 2026, filed it under trad house and made the point that matters most about it: there is little or no paddywhackery here, just the impassioned muscle memory of resentment. The same review found real variety inside a single sonic palette, reaching for Damien Dempsey on the lyrical side and Depeche Mode on the production side, and judged it to work on both counts. A spread of further reviews followed across UK outlets through late September and early October.

Where they stand, October 2026

The Cyber Celt world tour was announced as a 51-city run opening in July 2026, and the Irish launch was timed to the record. The band played a sold-out Vicar Street in Dublin on 17 September — their largest crowd to date — with the album going live at midnight, then Limelight 1 in Belfast the following night, plus in-store acoustic sessions in Dublin and Galway.

A 24-date North American leg ran through the autumn, taking in Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, St Paul, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Nashville, Atlanta, Houston, Austin and Dallas across October. Britain and continental Europe are next: Nottingham's Rescue Rooms on 3 November, London's Scala on 4 November, then Haarlem, Paris, Brighton, Manchester's Deaf Institute, the Brudenell in Leeds, Birmingham, Oxford, the Warehouse at SWG3 in Glasgow, Liverpool, Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff, Berlin and Paderno Dugnano in Italy by 21 November.

After that the routing runs east — Singapore's Esplanade Annexe Studio on 6 December, Australian dates to mid-December — before home shows in Cork, Kerry and Bantry between 27 and 29 December. On 16 September the band added a further North American block for 2027, reported as 21 shows; venues have since listed dates into the spring, including the Fine Line in Minneapolis on 6 April 2027. Songkick currently lists 40 upcoming concerts across nine countries.

The show

Byrne's own word for a Chasing Abbey gig is Mass, and the band report audiences telling them it was the best concert they had ever seen. Allowing for the fact that bands say this sort of thing, the structure of the set does support the comparison: a lot of call-and-response, long instrumental passages built on reels and jigs, and material that is explicitly about a shared history rather than about the three men on stage.

The Dublin opener ran as an 18-song main set plus a three-song encore. It began with Gorta and Arís Is Arís; before Seachain the band spoke from the stage in support of Palestinian liberation. Culchie and Seán Tír were both played live for the first time, and the traditional borrowings — Morrison's Jig, Learning to Dance (Lanigan's Ball) — sat alongside Scartha, Mar Sin, Colonised Minds, Greedy Pigs, Saoirse Saoirse and T.a.L. Oh My Johnny (Banks of the Roses) remains the peak; it brought the room to its loudest. The encore opened with Íoróntá, ran the reel Bag of Spuds, and closed on a second pass at Arís Is Arís.

Support on the Irish leg came from Tolü Makay, Nigerian-born and Tullamore-raised, playing material from her EP People Still Cry In Summer and finishing on War and Trust.