As we bid farewell to 2023, come along with us for a series of interviews with a few artists. We’ll chat with them about their experiences, challenges, and successes throughout the year. These talks give you a close-up view of what happened in the metal music scene in 2023. We chatted with Rioghan Darcy of RIOGHAN to see how the progressive metal band have experienced 2023.
RIOGHAN has always been a very productive project, towards the end of the year, you are also releasing a new EP, “Covers III,” how much time did you spend in 2023 composing music?
I’d say a lot but still not enough, there are so many lingering ideas in my head and in our shared cloud files that are just waiting to be arranged and polished!
Did you have a lot of goals set for RIOGHAN in 2023 and were you able to achieve them all?
Our goals were to get our live shows going, and we got there by November with our first gig at On The Rocks Helsinki. Our second goal was to make demos for the new album, and those are also nearly done! And third, we just got an idea to do another Covers EP and as you all hopefully have heard, that also came true. Maybe some personal goals within the maze of social media and so on are yet to be conquered, but we’ll get there!
Were there some things that you weren’t able to realize this year that you might try and pursue in 2024?
Definitely more live shows! It has been such a fun journey to prep the set and be together in rehearsals. That was something I knew was going to be a tough one to put together, and at first, I didn’t even realize all the little things needed to be done, but it was such a rewarding experience to work on something in long term and finally get to perform it to actual people!
Did you (re-)discover any new music?
I did also find new loves (like HAKEN’s “Fauna,” SLEEP TOKEN’s “Take Me Back To Eden” and “Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre”), but all-in-all, I feel like this year’s been re-visiting and researching the past and older favorites. I’ve been listening to a lot of softer music, acoustic and neo-folk, and all kinds of soothingly depressing stuff.
What can we expect from RIOGHAN in 2024?
A new album [laughter], live shows, and maybe a few interesting collaborations, too. Thank you so much for the interview and have a super 2024!
