Words and images: Medb @m _e_d_b _

The most exciting music you'll hear this year comes from a council estate bedroom in Belfast! Medb is the enigmatic creative powerhouse you’ve never heard of...but it’s about time you did!

Meaning “she who intoxicates” in old Irish, Medb (pro- nounced mayv) does just that as a singer-songwriter, musician, poet, photographer and visual artist. A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, she now works at home in Northern Ireland, without any management or financial backing, constantly producing work that far exceeds her limitations, and is a champion of her working class roots and values.

‘The Rise and Fall of the Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ is the first collection of songs from Medb’s long awaited debut album. Spawning from a six part poem of the same name that was intended to tell individual stories of famous young women who were the same age as medb at the height of their notoriety, the verses fit seamlessly into melodies she came up with in her initial writing sessions. It was written in part in the stock room of Topshop, on Princes Street in Edinburgh, finished in the attic bedroom of a Victorian two storey flat she shared with 6 other people, and recorded and mixed entirely in her childhood bedroom in a council house just outside Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Soft Serve documents the artist’s love/ hate relationship with the fame and folly of beautiful superstars such as the Kardashian/Jenners - acknowledging how dangerous the strive for a perfect body and lifestyle can be and yet the inability to look away and disconnect from these people and their lives. The soft to heavy dynamic of the song’s sound is one that subconsciously appears throughout the album and works as a perfect soundtrack for the songs’ conflicting narratives.

Song for Saoirse was inspired by the tragic death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a Kennedy tragedy for the burnt out millenial/Z generation with echoes of the “metoo” movement and prescription drug addiction. The artist was particularly touched by how close in age she and Hill were and the fact they were both prescribed the anti-depressant Fluoxetine. The song is a short bittersweet ballad of the tragedy of being unlistened to and unbelieved as a young girl processing trauma.

The album ‘eternally baby bunny’ will follow on from countless well received soundclound releases, ventures with the bands Bumper Car Kittens and Shark Tale Themed Birthday Party, an experimental Jonas Brothers cover project called Jonastown Massacre, and performances in Belfast, Derry, and Edinburgh, as a defining moment in Medb’s career.

Originally conceived as a concept project about historical women, the album very quickly became semi-autobiographical, as well as reflecting on the personal history of the women in the artist’s family, and thus has become a self-mythologising opus of the working class womxn’s experince. Medb’s sonic and visual in- fluences for this album include Lana Del Rey, Beach House, Kate Bush, Mitski, Cherry Glazerr, and Sonic Youth.

‘The Fall and Rise of the Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ drops on all music streaming platforms, as well as being available for direct purchase on Bandcamp, on March 28th with the full ‘eternally baby bunny’ album arriving in early summer 2020.

You can find Medb’s work on her website https://medb.info , on Soundcloud and Spotify.