10 ones to watch in 2025: Emerging bands, artists, writers, etc from Cork city and beyond
A talented crop of talented young creatives look set to make their mark in 2025
Cork visual artist Lara Quinn graduated with a BA in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 2024, making waves with her degree show, which was themed around the mythic biblical figure of Lillith, and picking up the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year award for her work.
Quinn kicks off 2025 with a group exhibition in Dublin’s Clancy Quay Studios in January, the result of an artist development programme called Superprojects which connects contemporary artists and their art with children and young audiences.
Her first solo show at the Lavit as part of her Student of the Year award is scheduled for late spring or early summer, and the artist, who originally hails from Carrigaline, says she’s “in talks regarding some other opportunities” also in spring.
“Outside of that, I am preparing a n entirely new body of work, which expands upon the work from my graduate show,” she says. “This includes new paintings, but I am also now engaging in performance for the first time, currently making a performance to camera piece filmed at the mythological site of Oweynagat Cave (Uaimh na gCat) in County Roscommon.”
The post-punk five piece from Kinsale released their eponymous debut EP in June 2024 on the UK-based Indie label So Young Records, and have already been hot tipped by other acts including Grian Chatten from Fontaines DC and Fenian hip hop trio Kneecap as rising stars.
Cardinals played a string of sold-out dates in the UK, the Netherlands and on home turf in 2024, and closed out the year with their first ever shows in New York in December.
Featuring Euan Manning on guitar and vocals, Oskar Gudinovic on guitar, Aaron Hurley on bass, Finn Manning on accordion and Darragh Manning on drums, Cardinals’ sound has been described as “Pogues-leaning,” with its amalgamation of rock, punk and Irish folk.
2025 brings more big things for the band: further tour dates to continue to build a fanbase across the US and the UK, as well as headline gigs across Europe, will be combined with studio time: the band’s management confirmed to the Irish Examiner that Cardinals are currently writing for a debut album “to land later next year.”
Having had a resoundingly successful 2024, the only way seems to be up for Ballinhassig-born actor Máiréad Tyers.
Only having graduated from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 2020, 26-year-old Tyers has had stunning successes in streaming TV series including Amazon Prime Video’s Tudor comedy My Lady Jane, in which she plays best buddy to Lady Jane Grey, and in the lead role as Jen in coming-of-age superhero series Extraordinary on Disney+ and Hulu, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA in 2024.
2024 also saw a short and surreal horror film starring Tyers, Meat Puppet, pick up both the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award at SXSW film festival.
2025 will see Tyers cement her position as streaming queen when she makes her appearance on season 2 of Obituary, the dark Irish comedy which premiered on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player and which is now streamed on Hulu in the US and on Netflix in the UK.
Tyers joins the Obituary cast as local newspaper editor Vivienne Birch: the six-episode season was filmed in Donegal in autumn of 2024, and will screen on RTÉ and Hulu in mid-2025.
As a short story writer, Cork author Louise Hegarty is well-established: she won the inaugural Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize back in 2016 and has been published in many places, including The Stinging Fly, Banshee and The Dublin Review.
She was also a contributing writer for Sounds From a Safe Harbour festival’s 2021 augmented reality audio project, A City + A Garden, which took festival-goers on aself-guided audio-reimagining of Cork city landmarks.
But 2025 marks a milestone for the writer with her debut novel, FAIR PLAY, due for publication in hardback by Picador on April 3rd in Ireland and the UK, and by Harper in the US at around the same time.
“I have spent most of 2024 dealing with edits on my novel and also on my forthcoming short story collection, which will also be published by Picador,” Hegarty says. “I’m obviously very excited about the book finally being out in the world but it’s a little nerve-racking as well.”
To coincide with the novel’s publication, there will be a launch on home turf in Cork in April, as well as a mini-tour of UK book shops, and an event in UCC alongside I Will Crash author Rebecca Watson.
Rising musical theatre star Claire O’Leary, who grew up in Rathcormac in North Cork, is now based in London, where she has had several notable roles in West End productions, including as Glinda the good witch in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Wizard of Oz, but one of her highlights of 2024 was a stint back home for Cork Opera House’s Summer Revels.
She also appeared as one of five singers in Cork Midsummer Festival 2024’s Creatures of Habit, a libretto about the impacts of our habitual behaviours on ecological collapse.
Early 2025 sees O’Leary wrapping up a stint treading the boards at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where she plays the role of Arrietty in The Borrowers, adapted from the Mary Norton children’s book by Charles Way.
“I'm having an absolute ball,” O’Leary says. “The production in running until January 12, and then it'll be back to London for me. I'm juggling the show with auditions for upcoming productions for 2025, so I'm excited to see what the new year brings.”
Cork-born writer, actor and singer Emer Dineen’s semi-autobiographical show 0800 CUPID was hailed as a highlight of Dublin Theatre Festival 2024 when it premiered at Project Arts Centre in September, and continued on to positive reviews at London’s Soho Theatre a month later.
The show, produced by queer theatre company THISISPOPBABY with director Phillip McMahon at the helm, features Dineen’s drag-king alter-ego called Cupid, by no means the performer’s first or last stint camping it up in a masculine persona and in club-inspired settings: she has performed at experimental drag parties Haus of Wig, as well as in character as DJ Duncan Disorderly in another critically acclaimed THISISPOPBABY production, Wake.
“I'm really looking forward to the year ahead; exciting plans are hatching,” Dineen tells the Irish Examiner. “We're travelling to New York in January to present 0800 CUPID with Culture Ireland. Then I'm on tour with Wake, bringing the show to venues such as Sadler's Wells in London in the spring.”
The plans for 2025 don’t stop there, with the ambitious performer developing a new musical project based on Irish oral traditions that will get an outing during the summer festival season, as well as an international theatre-making residency in Berlin later in the year.
Velvet-voiced singer-songwriter Rita Lynn, neé Doherty, hails from Mallow but is currently based in Cork city: her father is jazz musician, so perhaps it’s no surprise that one of her highlights of 2024 was supporting Les Amazones D’Afriques at Live at St Lukes for the Cork Jazz Festival, but she also shone during an RTÉ 1 Culture Night special in which she appeared alongside David Kitt and the RTÉ concert orchestra.
She describes 2024 as a “meaningful year” in which she moved away from performing solo and assembled a band, the better to flesh out live performances and instrumentation for a concept album which she has written, and plans to record in spring of 2025 and release come autumn.
“I also released a single and music video introducing the character of the concept album, back in May 2024, called Mystéé,” Lynn says. “My main hopes for next year are getting the record done and out there, accompanied by a wee irish tour. People can find me on Instagram at @ritaa_lynn if they want to follow for upcoming dates: there will be a few shows in spring that I'll be announcing in the new year.”
Multi-disciplinary visual artist Sorcha Browning, from Ballydehob, graduated from TU Dublin School of Creative Arts on Sherkin Island in 2024 with a slew of awards: the RDS Taylor Art Award 2024, the Graphic Studio Emerging Visual Artist Visitor Award, The Open Ear Graduate Award, The National Sculpture Factory Graduate Residency Award and Uillinn West Cork Arts’ Residency Award 2024.
Her film installation, Eden, can be seen at the RHA in Dublin until January 18: it’s part of a body of work that explores the notion of data collection, specifically the collection of “cookies,” the little parcels of information used by websites to identify your computer and monitor your use of the internet.
“I have two residencies coming up in 2025, one at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, and one in the Graphic Studio in Dublin,” Browning says.
“Eden is comprised of eight different video performances that are then layered into a sculptural environment that is made up of painting and digital collage projects. While making it, more ideas and questions were emerging for me, so at the moment, I'm following some of these unanswered threads and working on a new project that I hope to begin resolving during my upcoming residencies.”
Fresh-pressed five piece Smithereens won UCC’s Battle of the Bands in Cork’s Cypress Avenue in the spring of 2024, a headline gig in the venue as well as time in a recording studio. They’ve since played many quality small-to-mid size venues, including Dolan’s of Limerick and Fred Zeppelin’s, and released a debut EP, Emergency Entrance, in October.
Made up of Noah Snyder on vocals and keys. Isaac Wolfe on bass and backing vocals, Sam Healy on lead guitar and sax, Samvel Hovhannisyan on drums and Páidí Brennan on rhythm guitar, the band say they are intent on smashing the concept of genre to, well, smithereens: they combine elements of jazz and funk with high energy live performances more familiar from grunge and DIY scenes.
For 2025, the band say they are “set on bringing our weird little arts and crafts project to the rest of this island and hopefully beyond.” Expect a single release in January, another currently planned for April, with tour dates to back up both, and they are gearing up to record a debut album some time in early 2026.
Actor and writer Isolde Fenton hails from Limerick and trained at the Gaiety School of Acting and the United Kingdom’s National Youth Theatre Rep Company. Having spent the past two years pursuing her writing and acting career in London, in June 2024 she decided to return to Ireland and relocated to Cork.
“I felt creatively burnt out, and wanted to take a step back,” Fenton says. “However, since relocating, I have rediscovered my love for it all, and feel particularly supported by Cork artists.”
Within months, she had picked up a writer’s gong, winning the PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Award, 2024, for her play Chalk & Cheese, and presenting her work-in-progress, In A Bad Way, at Cork Theatre Collective’s SHOW at Triskel Arts Centre.
She is set to record Chalk & Cheese with RTÉ Drama on One early in 2025 and it will be broadcast at an as-yet unknown date, and is in conversations with several theatres and festivals to produce In A Bad Way during the year.
“Acting wise, I will be performing in Benjamin Reilly's production of Mortal Sin in Bewley's Café Theatre in spring or summer 2025,” Fenton says. ”I also recently filmed a short film called Welfare, written and directed by Arann Blake of Cork band Pretty Happy. I am looking forward to seeing what else 2025 will bring.”
