HOSTESS

Hostess is the new solo moniker of former Cap Pas Cap front-woman, Gráinne Dee, who released her debut LP, ‘A Simple Life’ in October 2018 on After the Quake Records. The record is the product of a period following the demise of Cap Pas Cap, when Dee hunkered down to solitary demo building in her Dublin City home seeking a response to personal tumult that a blank canvas can afford. From these lo-fi experiments came eight daubs of melancholia - swathed in lugubrious synth and plaintive vocal lines buried in the ether - which Dee then brought to long-time collaborator Stephen Shannon (Estel/Cap Pas Cap) at Experimental Audio Studios in early 2017. Loss and alienation are explored across all eight tracks but this is not what defines the album. From the PIL-esque ambiguity of Frustration’s ‘mother dreaming of falling cats’ to the gospel-echo strains of album closer Simples, we are left with a sense of something remembered and worked through. For a critically acclaimed album that came close to never being recorded, perseverance has won through to produce a compelling debut that tingles in its immediacy and will swell the heart of anyone who has come out the other side. Alongside such notaries as U2, the cranberries and the Pogues, RTÉ have declared A Simple life as one of the best Irish debuts ever.