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Two minutes into “The Juice,” a standout from the Mary Wallopers’ third album Paddywhackery, Andrew Hendy delivers a manifesto: “Dance to your daddy, and rosin the bow/ This is Irish rock’n’roll.” The line namechecks two old Irish trad songs, and recontextualizes them in the world the Mary Wallopers have spent the 2020s building, one where the long history of Irish folk is not a curiosity or an academic exercise, but a vital and living form of defiance. As soon as Hendy delivers the line, the band lights into an extended, intensifying instrumental passage proving that jigs and reels can, in fact, rip.
Anyone who’s been to Ireland and come across a raucous session in a pub knows that already. But in their career thus far, the Mary Wallopers have taken that sweaty barroom energy to bigger and bigger stages, years of feverish festival sets plotting a course to their 2026 tour with stops at massive venues like London’s Brixton Academy and Dublin’s 13,000-cap 3Arena. The sextet—brothers and co-frontmen Andrew and Charles Hendy, plus Róisín Barret, Catriona Gribben, Ken Mooney, and Finnian O’Connor—garnered acclaim overseas for their 2022 self-titled debut, a more straightforward trad album. It was 2023’s Irish Rock N Roll, their first to feature original compositions and punk and rock influences, that served as a breakthrough. The feral, incisive Paddywhackery builds and expands on their past work in every way.
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Paddywhackery takes its name from a history of derogatory Irish caricatures, particularly in England and America. At the same time, Irishness has gained some degree of cache outside Ireland. In turn, it has become commodified—“Everyone’s getting Guinness tattoos and splitting the G and wearing jumpers that say ‘Ireland’ on them,” Andrew said in a recent interview—while actual Irish people live with the socioeconomic strain of an increasingly expensive homeland. Paddywhackery even exists in a context in which Irish trad has become cool. Artists like Lankum, John Francis Flynn, and Lisa O’Neill have accrued international crossover success by taking trad and bending it into haunted, psychedelic directions, exhuming the ghosts and scars of their country. The Mary Wallopers are a less “cool” iteration of trad, and that’s part of the point. Paddywhackery reclaims a slur, leans into a sound that foreigners once perceived as cartoonishly Irish, and reignites the sociopolitical furor inherent in its heritage.
The album opens with a meditation on Irish identity from afar in “Crowns of England,” the song’s narrator bar-crawling in England wondering how everyone’s unaware of the country’s past atrocities. “For all the crowns in England/I couldn’t quench my thirst/So I wandered back to Dundalk town/The place that quenched it first,” they sing in chorus, fiddle and pipes keening. From there, the Hendy brothers cram a remarkable amount of ideas into Paddywhackery’s brisk, no-nonsense 33 minutes. If the album begins away from home, the rest of its songs interrogate Irish life then and now, there and elsewhere.
“This song is an ancient one, I wish that I could say,” Andrew sings in “Landlord’s Demise,” an original built on little beside his vocal and a thrumming bodhrán (the hand drum common in trad), before detailing how “greedy little landlords never really went away.” It sits alongside songs like Charles’ reading of “Worker’s Song,” a standard, and the wry anthem of “The Big Mixer.” The stories in each song could just as easily have taken place a hundred years ago, workers singing folk songs in a bar about the pernicious realities of struggling at the bottom of the industrial ladder. The Mary Wallopers don’t need to boldly underline their message to get it across: The same cycle plays out time and again, and the 21st century’s widening gulf between the haves and have-nots makes the band’s eternal protest songs immediate and potent.
The Mary Wallopers take a time-honored approach: You should laugh or else you’ll cry. For all the seriousness their songs catalog, the band is insistent that the music should be fun, urgent. From the galvanizing chorus of “The Big Mixer” to the ragged refrains of “Banks of the Roses” to sideways drinking songs like “Kit Kat Club” and a strikingly beautiful rendition of “Mickey Dam,” Paddywhackery is a vibrant series of vignettes. While their sounds are specific, the strife is universal. You don’t need to buy into any trendy narratives about Ireland to feel each of Paddywhackery’s songs in the gut, its righteous anger translating across borders and traditions.
