Last February, the Irish alt-pop artist Mr Billy Fitzgerald released his debut album, A Grand Romantic Gesture; the result of over a decade of fine-tuning after his band, The Dead Flags, came to an end and he searched for what his lonesome voice would sound like.

For what this author’s opinion is worth, I listed A Grand Romantic Gesture as the “Best Irish Album of 2025” in my end-of-year list for The GOO, and, at the time of its release, in a review, I wrote, “…if you put the album‘s tracklist on a dartboard, wherever you land, you will hit what could be a chart-topping radio hit with the right exposure.”

After the album, Billy got Mother Tongues, Frankenstein Bolts, Neosupervital, and Skysparkle to remix four of the album’s tracks, and released them as an EP titled A Grand Remixed Gesture in June.

But as Billy was trying to capitalise on these releases, he fell ill. “I got COVID for the second time in the summer, last year,” recalled Billy when he spoke with Post-Burnout this year. “It was one of these ones where I was over in London for a few days, having a great time, and I was getting on the plane, going, ‘I should put my mask on,’ because I had been quite diligent about things like that. [Laughs]

“And, you know, we’re so many years into this sort of stuff, but I just decided, ‘Ah, no! I’m fine! I should stop being so paranoid!’ And I immediately got COVID on the plane.

“But the two times I’ve had COVID, I’ve recovered relatively quickly, with symptoms, and testing negative, and everything, but the first time, I was about four weeks, just completely fatigued, unable to really stand up for a long amount of time.

“This time, it was basically the guts of three months with very little energy. For the first month, it was, like, if I was thinking a lot, I was really, really tired. So, that really scuppered the idea of actually promoting my album. [Laughs]”

As Billy struggled through his illness, he was unable to make new content and had to repurpose some videos he had recorded as music videos as promotional material. The silver lining to this biologically enforced ingenuity was that, through reviewing the footage, Billy was able to grasp what made him stand out as an artist.

“None of this stuff is a science,” says Billy, of trying to grasp the unique selling points of an artist. “And one of the really interesting things for me has been coming around to the fact that, ‘Hang on. I do things my way, and my music is quite different from other people, and I’m at a different stage of life,’ and all of that comes together into a thing that you can’t predict, and you can’t follow anybody else’s thing; you just have to keep doing it your own way.

“I didn’t start making music to be somebody else or anything; it was entirely about, ‘What do I have to offer?’, or ‘I think this is really good, I’d like to share it with people. Oh! People really seem to like it. I’d like to bring them to this other place.’”

Inspired specifically by CMAT, as well as the radical, idiosyncratic freedom that both pop music and being a solo artist permitted, as Billy recouped, he decided to reconstruct the album he had made one more time.

“I’m extremely obsessive,” Billy admits. “The way I work, it’s very by gut and feel, where I basically just work, and work, and work on the song. […] When I was doing A Grand Romantic Gesture… -so, a song like ‘Give Me a Chance’ – …that was like, ‘OK, I’ve got an idea for a little guitar bit. I’ve got an idea for a chorus. I’m going to go into the studio, and just work, and work, and work.’”

With this attitude towards songwriting, Billy would enter a flow state whilst completely immersed within the studio, and each song would be finalised with tonal inconsistencies. Some would have a plethora of layers, whilst others would be comparatively bare.

With Little Gestures, the four-track EP featuring Billy’s authorial retooling of Romantic Gesture’s “Gimme Love,” “Give Me A Chance,” “You Had Your Chance,” and “All Fucked Up Now,” was released almost a year to the date of the album in February.

“For me, it’s like sculpting away, trying to find the sound, and not really having an idea about exactly what you’re looking for; just knowing that this is probably the direction that I want to go in,” Billy says of the EP.

Since he recovered, Billy has been focusing on what he wants to do next, and he has had some songs in his back pocket as far back as the early 2010s, when some seeds he sowed for The Dead Flags never germinated.

It was one of these songs that he kept playing at his gigs, provisionally titled “Nightstand,” a galloping stream-of-consciousness playfully deconstructing the adolescent neuroticism of standing in the Sligo nightclub Equinox while trying to build up the sober courage to ask a girl out, which made Billy reconsider some of the songs he had shelved when crafting Romantic Gesture.

“Even before the album, when I started playing with my drummer, naturally, I was thinking about other songs I could play along with just the album songs,” recalls Billy. “Those songs just jumped to the front of mind. I’ve got these songs from years and years ago… – one or two songs – …and they’ve just been looking for a home.

“And the funny thing about them is, they’re really wordy songs; there’s loads of dense lyrics going on. And, in my opinion anyway, they [have] clever turns of phrase, and there’s loads of stuff going on in them.

“And what I realised, when I started thinking about the second album, was, ‘That’s the second album!’ So, I don’t mind them being old. I don’t mind them being a peek of songwriting for me! [Laughs]”

Billy’s second record is currently being recorded, being partially engineered with Darragh Nolan at Asta Kalapa in Gorey, Co. Wexford (primarily for the drums) and partially by Billy himself.

Unlike his debut (which was mastered at the illustrious and iconic Abbey Road Studios), for this new record, Billy wanted to strip away the flares on A Grand Romantic Gesture and craft a work that prosaically approximates the sound he and drummer Dennis Cassidy produce organically when performing live.

“It feels very different so far, and it feels like what we presented [live] on Tuesday, in Whelan’s,” Billy says of the arrangements recorded thus far. “It sounds more like us playing, and a bit more like those recordings.”

After experiencing the autonomy permitted as a solo artist, for this next record, Billy also wanted to return to the band dynamics he remembered from his days in The Dead Flags. “Album number one was me on my own,” he explains.

“I did draft in a drummer for four songs on the album, but there’s lots of ones where I was sequencing drums or whatever. There’s three guest musicians on one song, and none on most of the others! [Laughs]

“And it was all me working on stuff. But one of the things I noticed was, when I played live the other night, it was my wife Aoife, and Dennis, and these are two people that I’m extremely close to, and I have quite a big connection with them, and when I’m on stage with them, when I look over at them, I feel really supported, and I feel like, ‘Wow! I have people in my corner!’

“And that was the biggest thing when the band ended, and, suddenly, I was on my own… – I loved playing on my own! – …but I found it so lonely, going out around the place and playing for an hour or more on stage, because it is lonely.

“And I suffer from panic attacks, and I’ve had that happen on stage. There’s nothing to pull you out of it. There’s nobody else doing it. If you can’t push forward, you’re the only thing there.

“As nice as it can be to play on your own, the gang of being in a band, that feeling of, ‘We’re in this together!’, even if these are people I’m employing to play with me [Laughs], it really matters for my confidence. I found that was the thing I didn’t realise I’d miss about being in a band. I was like, ‘OK, great! Now I can do my own thing!’ Yeah(!) The band broke up! I didn’t break up the band!

“But as much as I knew I was going to miss playing with the guys, I was like, ‘Yeah! I can do my own thing! I can go in any direction!’ But there’s something about music, where it doesn’t exist in its truest, best form without other people.”

Mr Billy Fitzgerald’s latest EP, Little Gestures, is out now. You can keep up with Billy through his website.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews…tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.