Beloved Irish indie artist Maria Kelly shares her sophomore album Waiting Room on Friday, February 28th, 2025. Maria’s signature gossamer sound reaches new, bolder heights on an LP that also sees her reclaiming control over her life.
Waiting Room follows four years after Maria’s 2021 debut album The Sum of the In-between. Detailing the intricacies of her own mental health journey, the record quickly found its home, amassing millions of Spotify streams, as well as ten million radio impacts within its first few weeks. The LP rallied support from the likes of Notion, Clash, and Totally Dublin along the way. It now sits at more than six million streams worldwide, with one track, ‘someone else’, soundtracking the trailer for hit TV series Conversations With Friends. Previously, Maria has shared stages across Europe with the likes of KT Tunstall, Orla Gartland, James Vincent McMorrow, Villagers, Tom Odell, Ezra Williams, and more.
The Waiting Room is both a very real place, as Maria found herself stuck in sterile clinics hoping for answers to inscrutable chronic pain, and a dream-like, surreal space representing her own inner world. “This album is an exploration of the roadblocks, both internally and externally, that keep us feeling powerless and taking away our agency,” Maria explains. Beyond Ireland’s oblique quagmire of a health system, Maria ruminates on the housing crisis, societal expectations, faded friendships, and more—all through a personal lens, but communicated with a poetic universality as only a double Aquarius can.
Recorded between the Start Together Studio in Belfast and Black Mountain Studios in Dundalk, Waiting Room features a collection of long-time friends and collaborators: co-producer and co-writer Matt Harris (HAVVK, Birthday Problem), drummers Hannah Hiemstra (Rachael Lavelle, Rival Sisters) and Nigel Kenny (Bitch Falcon), vocalist Julie Hough (HAVVK, PostLast), mixer Rocky O’Reilly (Oppenheimer) and others. It was Matt (who also produced Maria’s celebrated debut album The Sum of the In-Between) that pushed her beyond her familiar folk sound into the open waters of indie rock. After sending Matt the first track ‘Like A Wave’—originally written on guitar during a stay at The Beekeepers in Co. Clare—he returned it with a bed of synths and ocean sounds that are warped yet lulling, bringing the natural and the inorganic together. This new oneiric direction sparked something in Maria: “We were opening a world here.”
Part of this world is an anger that Maria has rarely tapped into. A self-described people pleaser, songs like ‘Waiting Room’ and ‘When I’m Angry’ see Maria finally embracing that fury and all the power that comes with it. The title track was inspired by Maria’s frustration with the inaccessibility of the Irish health system. Radiohead-like texture and blips of an EKG monitor fill the space as Maria’s tender voice intones: “I wait to hear my name / I wait to feel okay.”
And there’s plenty more to draw ire. “We keep trying to fix ourselves when it’s our external circumstances that so often dictate how we operate in the world. The systems are against us or broken, and we’re forced to blame ourselves,” Maria explains. ‘Nearly Thirty’ and ‘His Parents’ House’ are both housing crisis songs. The former is a contemplative wake-up call, written when Maria lived in a dire Dublin rental situation, with the letting agent patching over a leak in the roof for months on end until it was about to collapse. ‘His Parents’ House’ is an anthemic moment in the mode of boygenius. Like many young adults in Ireland, Maria and her then-partner moved in with his family to save money—an opportunity she was grateful for, while also mourning her loss of independence. “Think of the money we’ll save at his parents’ house,” she sings wryly over driving drums, an all-too-common refrain for many Gen Z-ers and millennials in Ireland.
Underneath this anger is also a deep well of melancholy and wistfulness. ‘Drive’—which was featured in the international trailer for the film Ezra, starring Robert De Niro—is about longing for closure, and grappling with the reality that it may never come. It’s a rose-tinted story of ‘what-ifs’, fuelled by the desire for forgiveness, and the need for permission to finally move on. ‘Rearview Mirror’, Maria’s favourite track on the album, takes place on New Year’s Eve and documents the distance felt between your life and those of old friends, soundtracked by Rob Campbell’s mournful cello. “I get very emotional when friendships break down for no reason,” Maria says. “Every time I’m home for Christmas, I can’t ever brush off growing apart as just the way life goes. I wrote this song about the sadness of not relating to old friends anymore, and then also needing to let go. I’m not that person, they’re not those people.” ‘Something Better’, on the other hand, is about the pressures we put on ourselves to meet our own impossible expectations, and a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the self-involved disappointment that often follows. Written with Laoise Ní Nuallain and Seán Behan, the song adds an urgency to Maria’s usual sparkling melodies.
The soft, acoustic ‘Slump’ acknowledges the difficulties of finding yourself stuck in a rut. Maria says of the track: “It captures a starting point—finding myself, once again, at the beginning of a mountain to climb, with no real will to climb it. It began on guitar, but once Matt and I got to the studio, it felt like the lyrics required more humour in the sound. It landed in this funny twee universe that I think pokes fun at that self-deprecating space we can all find ourselves in.”
Finally, though, Maria’s fury breaks through on the last track, ‘Appointments’. Matt’s piano provides a shimmering backdrop as Maria builds to a guttural yell, which is then twisted and warped into an eerie cry. “I never knew my voice could do that, and that was a potent studio experience,” Maria recounts. “I started crying really viscerally when I came back out, because even physically it was so cathartic.” Maria’s voice, once whisper-soft, cannot be denied any longer.
Track List
Like A Wave
Waiting Room
Drive
Something Better
Nearly Thirty
Slump
Rearview Mirror
His Parents’ House
When I’m Angry
Coming to Kill
Appointments