​​Listen closer and you will find in the music of Joshua Burnside a tangled Celtic knot of contradictions. The Belfast-based folk artist makes music that is Irish through and through, yet his musical inspirations are sourced from North American influences and his intended audience is increasingly international. Is it folk music if the origin and intended destination of the music is not tethered to its traditional locality? Must there be a native “folk” that prescribes and responds to a folk tradition? How does a musical tradition remain both cohesive and relevant in the face of an ethically diversifying Northern Ireland? These are just some of the seemingly contradictory questions that Burnside’s blend of experimental folk idioms can bring to mind. Of course, the resolution of these contradictions is not necessary to enjoy the vernal colours of his growing discography, but asking them will nevertheless help chart what the path ahead might look like for such an imaginative talent.

The last two years have been seminal for Burnside, whose 2025 release of Teeth of Time marked the first release under his self-titled project in nearly five years. That album seems to have introduced a neo-folk genre its listeners didn’t know they needed: one which manages to stitch traditional street songs with fanciful audio manipulations that verge on experimental sound art. It’s since gathered a list of accolades that includes The Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year; Folk Album of the Year (Sound Roots); and one of BBC 6 Music’s Albums of the Year for 2025. The album’s charm lies in that indelible mark of a work that is a fully formed orb, a well-conceived gestalt in the sense that each song borrows its shape and meaning from a cohesive lyrical universe. It is a creative achievement that lands in a sweet spot between a precious personal project and a public jukebox of songs that will prove hard to forget. A lengthy recoil period has been earned, and fans were indeed expecting another few years to pass before Burnside’s next product from the recording booth. Instead, he returned in Spring 2026 with the ominously titled It’s Not Going to be Okay, less than a calendar year after Teeth of Time. 

It’s Not Going to be Okay was spurred almost entirely by personal grief: the passing of Burnside’s lifelong childhood friend Dean Jendoubi─also a musician from Northern Ireland. For better or worse, this project lives in the shadow of its predecessor. This might even be by design inasmuch as it’s not an album that’s seeking the light. Listening to its ten low-flying tracks, one can imagine one of those long-exposure shots of a Queen of the Night (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) flower’s bloom ─ famous for blooming only once a year, overnight, and wilting by dawn. Does that mean you ought to only listen to this album once a year at midnight? No — but it is an album that captures the protracted fever of grief, before this fever finally breaks in the penultimate song “Moon High”. In that sense, there’s a brief wilt in the album’s last song “Remake” before this figurative night gives way to a slightly less gloomy morning and the whole cycle of grief is ready to be replayed again. 

There are a few presuppositions that an album like this relies on in order to work as something more than an assortment of B-sides on a theme of grief. Firstly, there’s the belief that grief is a universal experience, or at least a sort of universal currency that one inevitably accumulates as you go through life. (You can’t really spend it, the best you can do is inflate it with joy and love and so on.) Then there’s the presupposition that for an artist to feel this grief intensely and go on to express this subjective experience with artistic licence is an invitation to the audience to rinse their own personal grief with this work of art. As a whole, It’s Not Going to be Okay tests the tensile strength of these presuppositions. To put it plainly: what are we to make of this album – aside from its purely musical experience – without our own collective connection to Dean Jendoubi’s story? 

There are a few places (“The Last Armchair”, “With You”) where the music dwindles to the candour of postcards between two close friends, with the listener on the outside looking in. Then there are songs like “Nicer Part of Town” that call you back into a circle around the campfire with straightforward melodic lines that you can sing along to. By the time this album completes its bloom, it's clear that it’s a record made more for the artist than for the listener. So we are, in the truest sense, listeners, bearing witness to someone else’s stretch of grief. Whether or not it can translate to our own varieties of grief, will depend on future more charitable listens. And if there was ever a time to make sad folk music mostly for yourself, this is it. The genre’s sad uncle era is in full swing as the late-2000s folk-poptimism disappears into the rearview. In fact there are a few recent releases that would fit snugly on a playlist next to songs from It’s Not Going to be Okay: James Blake’s Trying Times, Charlotte Cornfield’s Hurts Like Hell, Iron & Wine Hen’s Teeth, Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE. 

The promise and magic of Burnside, however, is not best captured in this latest release. Whereas Teeth of Time titillatingly teeters between Irish traditional idioms and contemporary sound dynamics, It’s Not Going to be Okay rides on a less melodically distinct introspective sound. Its easy-going guitar and conversational lyrics are relatively uncharacteristic of Burnside’s otherwise ornamental discography. This endearing and deeply felt ode to a friend notwithstanding, Burnside is at his best when he’s fastening the Celtic knot of contradictions I mentioned earlier ─ tighter. His music sparkles the most when it’s halfway between Belfast and the wide world. When, for example, he sings in Teeth of Time’s “Marching Round the Ladies” that it “Doesn’t matter where you’re from, the Tories fuck us all,” it’s the sound of a politically charged rallying call to an international folk. To anyone anywhere that is willing to connect to this music. That’s powerful stuff, and his next return to the studio can’t come soon enough.