Dylan Flynn and the Dead Poets

A college band that kept rebuilding itself

Dylan Flynn and the Dead Poets began in Limerick around 2018, assembled from people who had met at college, and the group spent its first years shedding and replacing members before a settled line-up emerged after the pandemic. The churn was real rather than cosmetic: of the five players listed in interviews around the March 2023 debut album — Flynn on vocals, Keagan Forde on lead guitar, Emmett Ryan on bass, Evan Forde on drums and Chris Britton on keys and saxophone — only Flynn and Britton were still in place by late 2025, when the band was named as Flynn, Marty Ryan on lead guitar, Killian Moran on bass, Paul Breen on drums and Britton again on keys and saxophone.

The reference points the band and its early reviewers reached for were consistent from the start: The War on Drugs, Radiohead, Bon Iver, Gang of Youths, Sam Fender and Springsteen. That combination — wide, repetitive guitar figures underneath plainly worded songs about being in your twenties in Ireland — explains both the saxophone in the line-up and the heartland-rock turn the writing took later. Before any album there were singles and EPs, among them 'running away', 'life', 'more' and 'nowhere to live', and the collection 'crazy how we live like this'.

Three releases, mostly made without a label

The debut album, 'how are you feeling today?', came out on 10 March 2023, eleven tracks co-produced with Mike Gavin. The tour behind it is a useful marker of the scale the band was working at: Whelan's Upstairs in Dublin on 24 March, The Loft in Galway on the 25th, McHugh's in Belfast on the 30th, De Barra's in Clonakilty on 2 April, Dolan's Warehouse in Limerick on the 7th and The Waiting Room in London on the 14th. At that point the band's stated ambition was simply to get onto the bigger Irish festival bills.

A second album, 'the story after they're gone', followed in 2024, self-produced. Then came 'Lately', released independently in late August 2025 — a deliberately larger-sounding single built on driving guitars, keys and a saxophone line, written, Flynn said, as the first thing he finished after that album, with Petty and Springsteen on his mind. It was the lead track of the four-song EP 'i've been living life the wrong way', out on 7 November 2025 and also self-produced, which carried the single 'turn the page'. Flynn's own account of writing it was unsentimental: the songs came quickly, and what he was left looking at afterwards took a toll. The band headlined a UK and Ireland tour in November 2025 with sold-out dates.

A year in the studio, then a label

Then they went quiet. 'Piece of the Sky', released on 14 August 2026, was their first new music in close to twelve months, the product of an extended studio run across 2026 and the first release to arrive with professional machinery behind it. Nettwerk Music Group had signed the band — a roster that includes Flyte, The Paper Kites and Paris Paloma — and their live bookings moved to 13 Artists, whose clients include Arctic Monkeys, Blossoms and Inhaler.

The new material was also the first not made in-house. 'Piece of the Sky' was recorded, produced and mixed by Richie Kennedy, who has worked with The Murder Capital, at Perry Vale Studios in London, and mastered by Richard Dowling at WAV Mastering in Limerick. The song is about distance in a relationship; Flynn described the condition it came from as spending too much time turning over what you had together, which wears on a person more than anything else does.

'Bury Me Right Here' landed on 18 September 2026, written from the position of someone who has never left their hometown and has watched most of their friends build lives elsewhere — Flynn framed it as reflecting on a life and wondering whether the right path was taken. Both tracks sit on the EP 'Raging of the Night', released on 9 October 2026 via Nettwerk, five songs: 'Piece of the Sky', 'Bury Me Right Here', 'Running Away (For a While)', 'The Whole of the Moon' and 'The Power and the Grace'.

Where they stand in autumn 2026

By mid-August 2026 the catalogue had passed five million streams; by mid-September the band was reported at around 190,000 monthly Spotify listeners, 101,000 Instagram followers and 32,000 on TikTok, with playlist placings including New Music Friday UK, Fresh Finds UK/IE and Alternative Ireland. Airplay has come from RTÉ 2FM, RTÉ Radio 1, Today FM, BBC Introducing, BBC Radio 6, Radio X and Amazing Radio, and BBC Introducing's Gemma Bradley has said she is obsessed with them.

The support history traces the same climb. Early opening slots came with NewDad, The Frank and Walters, Milk and Kingfishr, then The Darkness; across summer 2026 they opened for Maroon 5 and Bastille at large outdoor shows. They have played SXSW in Austin and Electric Picnic, and in July 2026 took their first main-stage festival slot, at Forest Fest in Co. Laois, where they played a 45-minute afternoon set from 2.25pm.

The Irish leg of the current tour went on sale at 10am on Friday 31 July 2026 through Singular Artists, with the British dates on general sale separately.

The autumn 2026 tour

The run is the largest headline tour the band has attempted. Britain comes first: Manchester's Night & Day on 8 October, London Barfly on the 9th, The Prince Albert in Brighton on the 12th, Exchange in Bristol on the 13th, O2 Academy 2 in Liverpool on the 14th and the Attic Bar at The Garage in Glasgow on the 15th. Ireland follows later in the month — Ulster Sports Club in Belfast on 28 October and The Workman's Club in Dublin on the 29th — before a gap of three weeks and the hometown date.

That last show, at the Spiegeltent Pavilion in Limerick on Saturday 21 November 2026, is being described by the band's own camp as their biggest headline performance to date, which for a group whose Limerick benchmark was Dolan's Warehouse is the clearest measure of the year. Nearly three thousand people are tracking the band's dates on concert-alert services, a number that has risen alongside the Nettwerk signing.

What the shows look like now

These are club shows in rooms of a few hundred, run to tight curfews rather than festival schedules — the Bristol date opens doors at 7pm against an 11pm curfew, admits over-14s with under-18s accompanied, and has a single support act. BABYRAT opens the English dates; Liverpool adds Tilly Louise to the bill.

The sets now draw on an unusually deep catalogue for a band of this size — two self-produced albums, the 2025 EP and the five new songs — and the arrangements keep Britton's saxophone and keys as a lead voice rather than decoration, which is what gives the newer, Springsteen-leaning material its size in a small room. The band's live reputation in the Irish press has run ahead of its record sales for some time; one description that has followed them around is 'spine-tinglingly fantastic'. No verified setlists from the current run have been published.