Ae Mak – shares new single and video ‘Love Free’ from upcoming album ‘Folk Songs for Mama & Papa’

Irish artist Ae Mak (Aoife McCann) unveils ‘Love Free’, the third single from her forthcoming debut album Folk Songs For Mama & Papa, due May 29th, 2026 via Spacer Records.

Bright yet bruised, ‘Love Free’ is a luminous, slow-burning folk-pop offering that balances softness and strength. Built around spacious piano, choral harmonies and Ae Mak’s unmistakably intimate vocal, the track captures the tension between devotion and self-preservation… the moment where love asks to be expansive, or let go.

Ae Mak on ‘Love Free’:

“Love Free is based in romantic relationship – if you can love me right, I will expand out into all that I am

And I will move with all my being to give and be the same for you. 

But it’s about the wider heart consciousness and the reason why we are all here – to love and be loved and to walk the path we’ve chosen, been given, whatever you believe to be true, with inner trust.

It is still heartbreaking when I listen back to this song. I was pleading, offering myself to a love that couldn’t be. Feeling alone, hurting but willing to hurt to believe it. 

Willing it – creating it into reality, painting it, praying it through showering love and praise. We are such beautiful beings – I’m looking back on myself a year and a half ago exactly in that place and looking at her with admiration – so lost and vulnerable fighting for love in whirls of fear and uncertainty – calling out for guidance and remembering what true connection to spirit, love, feels like within herself.

The video was made by myself and my close friend Tim Shearwood. Tim flew over to Berlin a couple of weeks after I’d made the song, and we shot it in the apartment I wrote the record in. Other friend, Timothy Wiehn – has a grand piano (!!?) and the most beautiful high-ceilinged mirage of a home where I was lucky enough to live in for a while. I wanted to capture the space and the energy where I’d written the music – and capture the haze of the in between worlds of spirit and human. I referenced the Bohemian Rhapsody video to Tim, the heads lit in the dark harmonising – mirror imaging. There’s a feeling of gospel in the harmonic structure and instrumentation throughout the record, especially in this song – I wanted the visuals to reflect this and feel spiritual and washed and other-worldly. Tim shot on an old film camera with Vaseline and clingfilm on the lens.”

ABOUT THE ALBUM:

After years of crafting genre‑defying, other‑worldly pop and delivering visceral, kinetic live performances across Europe and the UK, Ae Mak’s debut album marks a quiet but profound shift. Folk Songs For Mama & Papa moves away from character‑driven art‑pop and toward something elemental – voice, spirit, and connection.

Influenced by artists including Björk, Aldous Harding, Judee Sill, and Paul Simon, the album explores cosmical, spiritual folk through Ae Mak’s unmistakable storytelling and sonic imagination.

Folk Songs For Mama & Papa is out May 29th 2026.
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