As a child, Róisín Bohan took classical piano lessons and learnt theory with the Cork School of Music, and entered performance competitions. As a teen, she took up the guitar and temporarily busked on the streets of Cork. And, for a while, that was the punctuation mark on her musical career.

Róisín, who possessed a multifaceted appreciation of all artistic disciplines, chose to study Visual Design in college and worked as an art curator in her twenties. Then, when the world locked down and she was about to enter her thirties, bringing with it the natural thoughts of re-evaluation and purpose that we all feel when entering a new decade of our short time on this planet, Róisín took up the guitar once more.

 “It was very much one of those lockdown hobbies that I took up, and it’s the only one that’s actually stayed as things have got back to normal,” Róisín says when she spoke with Post-Burnout. “I had played the guitar a bit when I was a teenager, but I didn’t play for ages.

“I moved out of home and didn’t bring a guitar with me, and I didn’t have one, and I decided to buy myself a guitar for the Christmas just before the pandemic happened, just as something to get back into, you know? For myself, as a hobby.

“Then, when the lockdown happened, I just had loads of time, obviously, and I was playing way more than I would have if the lockdown hadn’t happened. I found myself messing around and coming up with melodies, and even then I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s something that’s happening,’ but, like, I wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

“But, sure, we had so much time… – like, it was two years going in and out of lockdowns – …so, I started kind of being like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll actually do something with these melodies. Maybe I might actually try and write a song, and maybe I’ll actually perform the song.’

“I had never performed music, other than a few piano competitions as a child, which… – oh, my God! – …the anxiety and nerves I would feel at those things, they didn’t make me want to perform, necessarily! But that was classical music; that was quite a different thing altogether.

“But, yeah, I suppose I just kept following the thread. Like, the melodies came, and then I was like, ‘Hmm, maybe I’ll make a song. Oh, maybe I’ll perform the song. Oh, maybe I’ll record the song!’, and here we are!”

To fully realise her ambitions, Róisín had to overcome her childhood-engrained stage fright. “I did own an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar when I was younger, but I didn’t do anything with them,” she says. “I can be quite shy, and I was a shy kid in ways, and not in other ways. In other ways, I was quite outgoing.

“But the thought of going and performing…I think I tried busking as a teenager, but I’d have such a fear of performing that I would freeze up. I would forget words, I would blank, I wouldn’t be able to play chords, and when I started writing these songs and I wanted to perform them, I still had that nervousness around performing, so I really had to push myself and overcome that fear. So, I started going to open mic nights in January 2023, and I was like, ‘This is just going to be messy.’

“Like, I went up there, I forgot words, I forgot chords, but I just pushed myself through it, and, luckily, the open mic communities in Dublin are very supportive. I went to the open mic, and I was blanking on words, and I was like, ‘Sorry, guys,’ and people would just cheer you. They’d be like, ‘Yeah! Do it!’, and it really helped!

“I have a video from my first performance, singing one of the songs I had recorded and released, and my vocal[s are] terrible because I can hear that my throat is all tightened up because I’m so nervous, and I can really see the progression that I’ve made over the last couple of years. I don’t really get nervous anymore, but I’m still trying to own the stage more and get more comfortable taking up the space, but definitely the nerves part of getting up and doing it is gone now.”

Through these open mic nights, Róisín not only gained more confidence in her work but also established connections. She worked with musicians to form a band that she had in mind for her tunes, which was inspired by the sonic grit of grunge music and the lyrical sincerity of blues music, called Queen Bitch (an allusion to the David Bowie song). There were some initial hiccups in getting the project off the ground, namely solidifying a consistent line-up and Róisín’s lack of familiarity with how to get music professionally recorded and mastered.

Through her research, she found a studio which would aid in both areas: Beardfire Studios, which was located near her, but Róisín asserts that, while beneficial, this wasn’t her reason for choosing Beardfire; rather, they seemed simpatico. “I had been doing a bit of research because it was an area that I really didn’t know anything about,” she explains.

“I had a few rehearsals with a few musicians for the band, and I was like, ‘OK, are we a band that’s going to record together?’ I was looking at different studios. A couple of people at the time didn’t stay with the band, and it was kind of back to me and the guitarist, and I had been talking to different studios where they were like, ‘OK, you get the band in, you get the engineer in, you rent the studio, then you get it mastered and mixed,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God! There’s so much in this!’

“Then Beardfire, they were like, ‘If you don’t have a full band, we can do the arrangements. We have the studio already, we do the engineering, we do the mastering, we do the mixing,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God! They just do everything!’”

Queen Bitch’s first single was “Bones,” released in October 2023, only nine months after Róisín began doing open mics. In 2024, they released five follow-ups, which came out approximately two months apart throughout the year. We asked Róisín how Queen Bitch managed to have such consistency of output.

“We started with one, with the guys at Beardfire, just to test it out and see how it went, working with them,” she responds. “And then that went really well, so I was like, ‘Great. Let’s do more.’ We recorded in bunches of three, I suppose. So, we did three songs together, then a little while later we did another three songs, and then a little while later we did another three songs.

“So, we did work on three songs at the same time, which was a handy and efficient way to do it, I suppose, because we could just book in time. So, we’d have one session to track the three songs and another session to get the drums and bass down, and it made it work for all three of our schedules, which was a priority at the time. [Laughs]”

On Thursday, the band will release their first track of 2025 and their first double-sided single with “Even If I Pray” on the A-side and “A Popular Song” on the B-side. On choosing to release these songs together, Róisín says, “I felt they worked as a pair, sonically, just the sound of them, and they’re both quite long songs, I suppose. Some of the songs I have out are shorter, three or four minutes, and some of them are a bit longer, but these two are six/seven minutes each.

“There was talk when I was putting songs out before with a PR company about trying to make radio-friendly length, but I dunno, I just really see them as two pieces of artwork. ‘A Popular Song’ is the song I started writing first, like, of all the songs, in 2020, and it has a very basic guitar chord progression because it was when I had no intention of writing songs, but it was the song that I started with and followed through.

“There were some other songs around that time that I didn’t follow through because they were very much like, ‘Oh, this is just someone starting and learning to write music,’ [Laughs] but that one really just kept coming, but it, I suppose, took me years to finish. Again, it was one of those songs where I wrote the lyrics to one of the choruses on the day that I was going into the studio because I was like, ‘Róisín, this has been going on for four years, now! Will you just finish writing the song, you know?’ [Laughs]

“I just needed that deadline, and I’m happy with what I got, like. It didn’t put me under pressure in a bad way; it put me under pressure in a way where I was really acutely thinking about, ‘OK, what’s the song about? What am I being inspired by in my life right now that’s filling in the narrative for the lines?’, and something happened that inspired the lines, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that fits there. That’s what I want to put in there.’

“And ‘Even If I Pray’ was quite a different song. I actually wrote the chorus for that around Christmastime, and it happened very quickly; that song happened a lot more quickly. It just kind of fell into place quite naturally without a lot of thought, so the two of them are quite different in that sense, but then, in the themes of the songs, as well, ‘A Popular Song’ is about changing a narrative; like, about their being a song that’s really popular but, maybe, isn’t serving the people that well, and it’s about rewriting it.

“So, I think in the blurb for the song, it’s about changing the status quo, and that status quo is societal expectations. I suppose there’s the personal element of me deciding to pursue music going into my thirties. That isn’t really where I thought I’d be going in life, or where friends around me and people around me, thinking I’m crazy, going like, ‘What? You’re going to start a band going into your thirties?’ [Laughs]

“So, it’s about writing a new song that’s the new status quo and that lets go of those expectations from society of what you should and shouldn’t be doing at this time. And then ‘Even If I Pray’ is similar in a way. It’s about letting go of the past that might be holding you back or weighing you down.

“The song is really sitting in those negative experiences. Then, at the very end of the song, it’s kind of looking towards some more hope. It’s like, ‘Oh, I need to find something new.’ So, it’s saying, ‘This is the way things have been. Maybe it’s time to let go and move on now, but move on to what? I don’t know.’”

Next year, Róisín plans to release Queen Bitch’s debut album. “Because I recorded those bunches of songs at Beardfire, it kind of feels like it’s been going on for a while now. The songs have been recorded and done for almost a year, I suppose,” Róisín says of this album.

“This time last year, we had finished recording, so I am looking forward to just signing off on that and moving on to the next project because I’ve got more songs that I’d like to focus on. It feels like a bit of a conveyor belt, where I can’t really think too much about these songs while there’s still these other songs that I want to share and put out into the world, you know? And there’s only so much room in my head [Laughs] and capacity for everything, and I would like to move on. So, I am kind of almost signing off on this body of work.

“What I plan to do is put out an album of the ten songs because they were of a certain time. They were the songs that I started developing and writing during lockdown, [when I was] overcoming my fear of singing, and then these other songs that I have now are after that period. So, it is kind of signing off on that time and that bunch of songs, and then making room for what might be next.”

Before then, Queen Bitch will be gigging. On Wednesday, they will perform at the Generator hostel in Smithfield as part of the Breaking Sound showcase, and will return to the stage in June for a proper launch show for the new single at the Crowbar Terrace on the 21^st.

On choosing that date and venue for the launch show, Róisín says, “It’s nice because it’s the summer solstice, so it’s going to be a bright day, so it’s quite a nice venue, it has tall windows, so I thought on that kind of a day, it’s going to be harder to entice people down to a basement in, like, Workman’s or Fibbers or something like that, so I just tried to think of a venue that would be suitable for the summertime.

“It’s nice. It’s not too big a venue, so it’s not too much pressure to get it filled up. […] I’ll be sharing a lot more on socials in the coming weeks, and there’ll be some ticket offers and stuff like that. Some merch, official Queen Bitch merch for the first time. So, lots of activities coming up.”

Queen Bitch’s latest single, “Even If I Pray”/ “A Popular Song,” will be released on Thursday. You can keep up with the band here.

You can see Queen Bitch at:
28^th May – Dublin – Breaking Sound @ Generator, Smithfield (TICKETS)
21^st June – Dublin – “Even If I Pray” Launch Gig @ Crowbar Terrace, Temple Bar (TICKETS)

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… 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.