The musician Conn Thornton grew up in Belfast. From an early age, they studied and performed classical piano. However, despite being a musician, they were somewhat divorced from their local music scene. “Pop music was something that only really came to me in my really late teenage years, honestly,” Conn tells Post-Burnout.

“I sort of started getting into the real basic indie ones when I was nineteen. This didn’t include…well, it included some people from the music scene in Belfast. Like, Arborist was one of the ones that I would’ve listened to a lot, because he was fantastic and his last record is just so good, as well.

“But it was around the time of the lockdown, whenever I didn’t really have anything else to do, I just started listening to all of these albums that I had missed out on. I think I cleared, like, maybe, two-hundred-and-fifty/three-hundred from March to December, and it really informed a lot of things that I could do with writing music.”

At this time, Conn was a student at Queen’s University Belfast, where they were earning a Bachelor’s of Music, specialising in Classical Piano and Contemporary Composition. Inspired by acts like Sufjan Stevens and Phoebe Bridgers, a desire to craft more modern music bubbled within Conn. “I had been very classically-minded, and every performance I had done up until then had been classical piano and recitals and all that,” they explain.

“Just because I wanted to branch out a bit with the time that I had, I just started writing songs, and they started pouring out of me, and out of me, and out of me, and it created enough for two albums.” These two albums’ worth of songs would see their way onto Conn’s debut album, Destroyer (released in February 2021), and its follow-up, Tragedy (released in October 2021).

“Granted, both of those albums are complete…like, they were learning curves for me,” continues Conn. “I still look back at them, and I play the songs, and I do have a lot of love for them, but if I were to do them now, there is so much that I would do differently.”

Before those albums, however, Conn began their current project with the five-track EP, Abraham’s Daughter (released in August 2020). Beyond learning how to craft pop music, they also autodidactically learnt how to produce on Ableton as they went.

“That was sort of my first attempt at writing songs, and that was done for a module in uni,” Conn says of Abraham’s Daughter. “We had to create a professional portfolio of work, and I just started writing these songs for it, and they just stuck.

“The professor that was marking the work said that they were really good, and I just stuck with them. They were all done on the piano because that’s all I really had; I couldn’t play the guitar all that well at that time.

“Some of those songs seem very, like…not ‘juvenile,’ but, you know, you can tell that they were among the first songs that I wrote, and I do think they have a lot of classical influences to them, but you can see a mark of difference between those songs and the ones that I have now.”

Abraham’s Daughter and Destroyer were recorded and released while Conn was living in Belfast. In the autumn of 2021, Conn moved to Bristol to earn an MA in Composing Music for Film and Television at the University of Bristol. Tragedy was released a month later.

“Bristol’s fantastic!” exclaims Conn. “Like, it’s just got so much history to it, and I really felt like I was dipping my toe into something that was so much bigger. The masters that I did there in Music, I was taught by a bunch of esteemed people; like, esteemed composers, and producers, and everything. There was a fella that I was taught studio techniques by, who recorded Portishead’s first two albums. So, that was bizarre.”

However, Conn’s time in Bristol was fully occupied by their Master’s, and, while they did some open mic nights, for the most part, they were unable to fully experience the city’s music scene.

Upon receiving their MA in 2022, Conn moved back to Belfast. Due to their lack of connections in the local scene at the time, the return felt like starting from scratch. “I was still very new to the Belfast music scene,” Conn says.

“Because I had only started getting into it in the last couple of months before moving to England, everybody was just like an Instagram presence to me. I had never seen them live, never met them in person, so they were just like stars to me.”

An initial break came when the Belfast queercore band, Problem Patterns, emailed Conn to ask if they would contribute a song for their compilation record, Bangers ‘N’ Pride! Released for Pride Month 2022, the comp featured contributions from various local and international acts to raise funds for the Northern Irish LGBTQ+ charity, The Rainbow Project.

While Conn admits that they still have no idea how they initially got on Problem Patterns’ radar, they were unbelievably thankful for the opportunity and accepted straight away. In Bristol, they had begun crafting some songs, and one they had finished was “Acrobat.” This was to be their contribution to the compilation, and this would also kickstart their next album cycle.

“At its heart, it was a great song,” Conn says of the version of “Acrobat” featured on the comp. “I really did think that there was something there, but that version of it just needed so much work on it, so I just completely redid it for the album. That was about the time that I moved back, so I really felt like I came back to Belfast, hitting the ground running, and writing, and recording all that music.”

Before embarking on the journey for their next album, Conn spent a year performing live around the city; an experience they feel their formal education had not truly prepared them for. “I feel like it was completely new,” they say.

“Like, my prior experience on being on a stage had been, like, playing the piano in music festivals, or galas, concerts, or whatever. It was very methodical – sheet music in front of you, just have to stick to that, and maybe do a bit of interpretation to spice it up a bit, but nothing beyond that.

“Like, you didn’t fully have to engage the crowd as a personality; you just had to play the music, then go on. I feel that did have to come to me after a bit of experience performing on the stage with my own work.”

But Conn persisted, and acclimatised to the demands. Now confident as a performer, Conn began contemplating an album based on their time in Bristol. The majority of the songs were written retrospectively after Conn had returned home, with “Acrobat” and “An Invincible Summer” being the only two songs that Conn had actually fully written in Bristol to make it onto their next record, Meteorite Season, which was released in June 2024.

Having upped their skills as a producer through their time at university in Bristol, Conn feels that there was a noticeable leap in quality on Meteorite Season when compared to its predecessors. “I think Meteorite Season is probably a very good starting point, because I feel like it’s totally representative of my overarching sound,” they say.

“There’s a lot in it, and sometimes I think that, maybe, some people could think that that’s bloated. Some people could think that it’s not really congruent, as a body of work. I do. I really think it is. I can see a thread going through it – almost like a narrative thread of sorts – because the narrative is, basically, my entire year of living in Bristol.”

Only a little over a year after releasing their album, Conn already has their sights set on what’s next. In October, they will release their second EP, When Bethesda Lands They’ll Throw Us A Parade. “It is a lyric from the last track, ‘Heaven, I’m In Heaven’,” Conn says, when explaining the title.

“So, the running theme with the EP is that each song is about a film that I watched in the immediate aftermath of finishing Meteorite Season, because I felt like I had to keep making music, or else I’m not really doing anything. Because I had written so much personal stuff on Meteorite Season, I was like, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I just need to write about something that allows me to be a bit more creative.’

“So, I wrote about films, and the last track, ‘Heaven, I’m In Heaven,’ is about the Mike Nichols adaptation of Angels in America, which is kind of a film/kind of a TV series; depends on whatever way you look at it. The last scene of that is set at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.

“I can’t remember exactly what the story with the angel Bethesda is, but I think the angel came down from Heaven and touched the fountain in Jerusalem, and water started flowing out of it again. I think that’s it, anyway.

“But Angels in America is a very, very fundamental queer text, and it’s all about the AIDs crisis and all that, but also, a very out-there fantasy. And, writing directly about the film, I just sort of used the angel Bethesda as a figure for queer liberation.”

The first single from this upcoming EP, “The Ballad of McKinley Park,” is a strong example of Conn blending the films that inspired them with their own experiences. Named after the park in Sacramento, the track is inspired by both Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird and a trip Conn took to the Californian capital to visit friends.

Explaining the track, Conn says, “I was sort of trying to run two different narrative threads between what happens in Lady Bird – the fact that she really hates Sacramento and wants to leave, because, you know, it’s the general feeling you get with your hometown – and reconciling that with my own feeling of being like, ‘This is incredible! I love it here!’”

Bittersweet, with elegies for blissful junctures of time, contemporary disquietude, and agnostic optimism for the future, Conn feels that Bethesda is necessary for this point in time, saying, “It’s something that I couldn’t not write about.

“I said, initially, going in, ‘I’m going to try not to make anything personal,’ but I felt like some of this spilt in. […] I think some of it can just sit so deeply in you that it distils itself into things that you write, and that’s what happened when I wrote ‘Heaven, I’m In Heaven.’

“It’s something that I couldn’t really help write about. Especially, with the rights of queer people in so many different parts of the world being under threat. We’re actively under attack right now. It is sort of a dream about the ultimate liberation of that, and using the angel Bethesda as a picture of that. It felt very apt to use that as the pinning point of the EP.”

Conn Thornton’s latest EP, When Bethesda Lands They’ll Throw Us a Parade, will be released in October. You can keep up with Conn and their music, social media accounts and more through their website.

You can see Conn Thornton live at:

Aug. 8^th – Belfast – Hustle (w/ Anthony Layde) (TICKETS)

Aug. 9^th – Belfast – Belfast Trans Pride Fundraiser 2025 @ Oh Yeah Music Centre (TICKETS)

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.