Ireland’s music scene is on fire. While the country has always had popular rock and pop acts, hip hop is finding a new global audience. Writer Dylan Murphy speaks to Curtisy, KhakiKid and Kojaque about how the scene has developed into an exciting force.

“It wasn’t easy to release music without feeling that hint of cringe,” KhakiKid says, reflecting on the early moments of his career. The Walkinstown rapper is parked up in a noisy studio he shares with the local streetwear store Emporium. He’s just joined a call with fellow Dublin rappers Curtisy and Kojaque.

The trio are a good shorthand for just some of the popular styles of hip hop coming from Ireland. Curtisy’s DIY rap record, What was the question? earned shout-outs from Dermot Kennedy and an RTÉ Choice Prize nomination for album of the year in 2024. Likewise, Kojaque has a number of album nominations under his belt, has toured across America and even inspired a Loyle Carner song in the process. Meanwhile, Khaki has been playing to huge festival crowds this summer, sold out a 1,500-seater hometown headliner and is about to head out on a UK tour of his own.

While now this level of success for Irish rappers is taken for granted and kids even openly aspire to follow in their footsteps, less than ten years ago it was very different. At that time, just revealing that you wanted to rap was enough fuel to be labelled cringe. Kojaque admits at the start, “it did feel scary” releasing hip hop.

For kids, now that might be hard to imagine, especially when artists like the Belfast-raised Jordan Adetunji have been nominated in the same GRAMMY Category as Kendrick Lamar and new-gen acts like Deathtoricky are being co-signed by fakemink.

But in 2018, the same quantity of mainstream touchpoints didn’t exist. Rejjie Snow might have been making moves in the UK and America, but at home there were still relatively few acts with enough visibility to serve as obvious reference points for aspiring rappers. That’s not to say the scene didn’t exist. For decades, artists like Scary Éire, Lethal Dialect, Messiah J & The Expert, Rob Kelly and many more had been laying the groundwork for what came next. Likewise, Tallaght trio Hare Squead were early innovators but were often overlooked, and while The Rubberbandits’ humorous brand of rap was successful, it was divisive for some aspiring to be taken seriously.

America and even the UK have deep-rooted rap cultures that just haven’t existed in the same way in Ireland. Additionally, while some of the local hip hop was good, it wasn’t being played on the radio so wider audiences weren’t conditioned to hearing rap with Irish accents. On top of that, Kojaque says he felt the scene that did exist lacked diversity, and a lot of the output was homogeneous, leaning heavily on classic East and West Coast styles, rather than feeling like something of its own.

Combine this all with a cultural inclination to be self-deprecating and the country still feeling the effects of the Catholic Church’s deep-seated suspicion of people trying something new and it wasn’t a conducive environment for making music steeped in braggadocio.

It was into this existing, if still marginalised, scene that Kojaque’s superb record Deli Daydreams landed in 2018. Armed with a drumless, spoken-word opener, a bass-heavy back-and-forth with Luka Palm on the state of the country and jazzy interludes, it built off the foundations of those before him and showcased just how culturally specific and ambitious a hip hop project could be. In fact, the year it was released, The Choice Prize changed the rules for what qualified in the album category, and it made the shortlist. While they denied it was specifically to allow for the inclusion of Deli Daydreams, it opened the door for shorter rap projects to be acknowledged and reflected the growing appetite for hip hop.

Coming the year after Rusangano Family became the first rap act to win the Choice Prize for their inspired writing on Ireland, immigration and politics on Let The Dead Bury The Dead, a new wave of acts was beginning to rewrite the rules for what it meant to be a rapper in Ireland.

“I came about a little later than Kev [Kojaque],” Khakikid says as his shoulders cast a shadow in the alleyway outside his studio. “So having someone like him around gave [Irish rap] a chance to feel like it could be something else,” he explains.

“I think it took the scene a long time to find its authentic voice as a whole,” Kojaque adds. “The genre has its origins in America. It’s ingrained in their culture and their state of mind. They’re painfully sincere and more open to being braggadocious… It took a long time for that to catch up and for an authentic voice to push through [in Ireland]. But it feels second nature now, which is nice. It doesn’t even seem like a topic.”

Curtisy is a product of that shift. The Tallaght rapper emerged years after Kojaque and admits he never felt any pressure to conform or fear of being a rapper. You’re as likely to hear him making wandering Earl Sweatshirt-inspired music as he is to jump on a Detroit beat. What’s more, he felt the love from minute one. There was never any apprehension about a curly-headed poet from Dublin gliding over trap beats or crooning about his nephew on chopped samples; it all feels like part of the increasingly rich and celebrated tapestry of hip hop in Ireland. While Kojaque and Rusangano’s Choice Prize success represented important breakthroughs, his 2024 nomination felt inevitable.

“It was just like open arms from a lot of people who are doing similar stuff to me, saying that I was doing the right thing,” he explains. “I felt confident the whole way, because there was so much of it around and because there were so many people [making rap].” This attitude is reflected in the underground scene championed by events series like Catacombs and led by acts like Nos, Earfzilla and Survival. It’s not perfect, though, and while acts like Denise Chaila and Celaviedmai have innovated and expanded the possibilities for rap in Ireland (the latter also won album of the year at the Choice Prize), it’s still an overwhelmingly male-dominated scene. But there is a newfound confidence, and young artists are headstrong in their belief, and the wider community is backing them.

The previous questions around authenticity and accents were never really resolved in a conclusive way, they just kind of disappeared. When something isn’t widely successful, it’s easy to point fingers and try to diagnose it, but when things are going well, they’re quickly relegated to the rearview.

Now, it’s way more appealing to grapple with why it’s breaking new ground. And when you have Londoners intellectualising Fontaines D.C., telling you they prefer Beamish to Guinness and generally larping as Irish, it’s hard to minimise the island’s cultural clout right now.

“I don’t know if Paul Mescal started it generally, but that romanticisation or fetishisation of Ireland – I’m here for all of it, man,” says KhakiKid, nodding to the wild success of Normal People. “And you know what’s so funny? It took Ireland getting fetishised by the whole world just for other Irish people to be nice to people,” he says with a grin.

“I’ve got to cash in on my Irishness before this bubble pops,” Kojaque adds, laughing.

Straightening his posture, the Cabra rapper speaks more earnestly. He points to the fact that Ireland has always had great art, but now it’s just getting more attentive eyeballs. Combine that with the relative lack of industry compared to the US or UK and he attributes some success to the idea that Irish acts often have to be more self-reliant. And it makes sense; restrictions breed creativity.

Coupled with the death of monoculture, artists’ increased digital fluency and the pervasiveness of algorithm driven discovery, we’re living in a time where a rapper from Tallaght is no longer first discovered locally through traditional gatekeepers. Instead he emerges online via the same algorithm pushing an alternative rapper from London onto a 16-year-old’s for you page.

It’s probably why we’re on a timeline where Danny Brown is shouting out Cork rapper Craic Boi Mental on his podcast or how Sugaboo landed in Lewis Capaldi’s Spotify Wrapped.

“It’s beautiful. It makes me so happy.” KhakiKid says. “Like, the world is just hilariously small.”

In the case of Sugaboo it might be perplexing as to why niche references to Kimmage have a global appeal but Khaki points to what he sees as Ireland’s unique lens. Irish artists can talk about universal things without losing the cultural specificity that makes their work distinct. ”I think Irish people in general have a very unique perspective… We can still talk about universal things, but come at it with an interesting point of view,” he adds. It’s not restricted to rap either, just look at the global impact of CMAT’s inspired songwriting or why Sinéad O’Connor’s words still resonate today.

However, it doesn’t erase the bizarre experience of being on the other side of the world and people screaming your lyrics about Dublin suburbia. “We played a show in LA and there were a lot of Mexican goths there,” Kojaque says. “I was like, how are you listening to this tune? I’m talking about Cabra Drive. It’s just the cul-de-sac I used to play football in. And all these Mexican goths up the front row that know all the lyrics. It’s mad.”

A lot can change in a short amount of time. Accolades that were once out of reach are now regular occurrences. While Ireland has always had popular rock bands, this is something new, and that’s worth savouring in itself.

“Personally, I can’t remember it feeling like this before,” Kojaque says. ”I think there’s a lot of beautiful music about to come out, and I don’t see why it couldn’t reach every corner of the world.”

Words – Dylan Murphy