Into The Music
Dermot Kennedy is one of the more quietly formidable careers in contemporary music. The Dublin-born singer-songwriter has sold out arenas on multiple continents, accumulated over four billion streams, and has been the best-selling debut artist in Ireland this millennium, all while maintaining a style that does not fit cleanly into any single commercial category. He is about to release his third studio album, The Weight of the Woods, on April 3, and the accompanying 32-date North American fall tour confirms the scale his career has reached.
Kennedy grew up in Rathcoole, County Dublin, started playing guitar at ten, and was writing songs by fourteen. He spent years busking in Dublin and crossing the Atlantic to play open mic nights in Boston before getting any real traction. That grounding is audible in everything he makes. There is a physical quality to his vocal approach, a sense that the songs were shaped by actual rooms and actual people rather than studio optimization, even when the production gets expansive.
His debut major-label album Without Fear arrived in 2019 and changed everything. It reached number one in both Ireland and the UK, a feat that almost no debut from an Irish artist had managed in living memory. Songs like “Power Over Me,” “Outnumbered,” and “Giants” built a fanbase that was unusually loyal for someone who had been working at this scale for only a short period. The shows got bigger fast. Red Rocks. Greek Theatre. Forest Hills Stadium.
His second album, Sonder, came in 2022 and continued the arc. The production opened up, the emotional range widened, and the writing had the kind of confidence that comes from knowing your audience is actually listening. Kennedy has been careful about what he says publicly and careful about how his music engages with the world outside the personal, but Sonder made clear he was not interested in staying small or staying safe.
The Weight of the Woods, announced for April 3, is his most anticipated release yet. The title alone signals a direction: this is not an album trying to sound effortless or breezy. The single campaign has been quiet and deliberate, which is either the choice of someone who trusts the material or someone who wants the full album to land intact. Probably both.
What makes Kennedy worth paying attention to beyond the numbers is that he is genuinely difficult to map onto the existing landscape. He is not Ed Sheeran. He is not Sam Smith. He draws from folk, from hip-hop rhythms, from the Irish tradition of emotionally direct songwriting, and from a generation of American artists who convinced the world that vulnerability could be loud. The combination is unusual, and it holds up.
The fall tour will be his most extensive North American run to date, with stops including Red Rocks again, the Greek Theatre again, and Forest Hills again. The venues are the same but the context is different. He is no longer being discovered. He is being counted on.
