Ailbhe Reddy built a life with someone, then it ended. KISS BIG is about what came after. The numb weeks. The panic. Looking in the mirror and not knowing who’s looking back.
She recorded these nine songs across Dublin, Donegal, London, New York and the American Midwest. The album opens with Align, a melancholy track where Reddy sings about seeing her ex in train window reflections, remembering how she loved him most when he was laughing and throwing his head back. She admits guilt, “I hurt you / I think of it all the time,” and hopes his new partner sees him in all the ways she was blind. It’s tender and resigned, banking on the idea that time makes all things feel alright.
That Girl follows, building slowly with keys and guitar before it explodes into a Florence Welch-level howl. The song opens in a Gin Palace, her ex asking hard questions while she pretends the answer’s at the bottom of her glass. She insists she’s still the same person he knew, underneath the bleached teeth and crow’s feet. The song ends with her watching him from across the street with his new girlfriend, hand on her back, sharing coffee and silent history. Reddy says it’s about how love shifts shape over time, how you stop seeing someone tenderly and forget what you once loved.
Then So Quickly, Baby tears everything open. Reddy calls it the meltdown track, the album’s neurotic heartbeat. Her ex told her they’d become two strangers living in the same house, that he barely recognized her anymore. She hid on her parents’ couch the weekend he moved out. The verses try for composure. The chorus asks the question burning through her: “How do you move on / So quickly, baby? / I’m still fighting you in my head / Why for you to live do I have to be dead?” It’s that neurotic whiplash when your ex seems fine and you’re lost.
Reddy read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble and Sarah Kane’s Crave while writing this. The title track and Crave both take their names from those influences. You can hear it in how she circles pain instead of stating it directly.
People will compare this to Julia Jacklin or Phoebe Bridgers. Makes sense. But Reddy has her own edge, catching the absurd parts of heartbreak alongside the devastation.
Her last two records, Personal History and Endless Affair, got her a Choice Music Prize nomination and festival slots at Glastonbury and SXSW. Those big stages taught her how to write choruses that land hard.
KISS BIG doesn’t resolve neatly. Reddy hasn’t figured it all out by the end. She’s still in it. Songs shift from whisper to roar without warning, keeping you off balance.
The record knows we repeat ourselves. Same patterns, same hope that this time will be different. Reddy doesn’t lecture. She just maps where the ground gives way.
*KISS BIG will be released on January 30 via Don Giovanni Records.
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