Sorcha Richardson announces much anticipated new album ‘Draw The Outline’ and shares new single ‘Illinois Again’

“absolutely irresistible. Returning for the first time this year, the Irish singer-songwriter holds the kind of emotional gravitas that steers you wherever it chooses, delightfully delicate and musically thoughtful.” - Wonderland

“Brilliant... reminiscent of Courtney Barnett’s stream of conscious delivery”
- The FADER

“cinematic, relatable and completely and utterly heartwrenching.”
- The Line Of Best Fit

“even with minimal components, she manages to bring her signature clarity and warmth.”
- Consequence

“extraordinary”
- CLASH

“heaps of charm and charisma”
- DIY

“a mix of wistful nostalgia and pounding, raucous jams”
- NYLON

--

Today, Dublin-born singer-songwriter Sorcha Richardson returns with the announcement of her much-anticipated new album Draw The Outline - out 11th September via Faction Records. Alongside the album, Richardson has also shared a warm and ruminative anthem about crowded loneliness titled ‘Illinois Again’.

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.

The new single ‘Illinois Again’ sits within Draw The Outline as one of its more outward-facing songs, but one that gently folds levity into loneliness, and motion into quiet reflection. It begins with an attempt to capture something light and extrinsic. A fun moment on tour that began twisting towards uncertainty. What starts as a “fun road trip song” gradually reveals a more existential undercurrent: the paradox of being surrounded by people and activity yet still feeling a sense of isolation.

Speaking on the single, Richardson says, “Illinois Again is a bittersweet song about connection and loneliness. It’s doing the thing you’ve always dreamed of doing, surrounded by friends, and yet still feeling an undercurrent of isolation and not fully understanding why.

It began as an attempt to capture the dreamy vignette of a headline tour across North America, but in writing about that euphoria I kept finding a quiet sense of disconnection. It's wanting to share a moment but feeling like you’ll never be able to explain it to someone else, or even hold on to it properly for yourself. This song is an attempt to hold those feelings side by side; the joy and loneliness.”

Hear / share ‘Illinois Again’ here

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.

Draw The Outline is out 11th September via Faction Records – pre-order here

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

Follow Sorcha Richardson:
Instagram
Tik Tok
Spotify
Bandsintown‍ ‍