VARO – share new single ‘Sweet Liberty’ featuring Ian Lynch of (Lankum / One Leg One Eye)

In anticipation of their upcoming album release The World That I Knew on May 9th, the Dublin-based trad music duo VARO share a new single ‘Sweet Liberty’ featuring Ian lynch. 

In its newly published issue (June 2025), MOJO declared the new album from VARO “A collective triumph” and made it their featured folk album in a 4 star review by Jim Wirth. 

Ian Lynch is perhaps best known as being a founding member of pioneering doom folk band Lankum, but also for his One Leg One Eye project – a black metal noise drone solo venture, deeply imbued with a sense of Irish history and myth, that saw the album …And Take The Black Worm With Me released on Nyahh Records in 2022. Lynch also hosts a monthly podcast and radio show, Fire Draw Near, which explores Irish traditional music and folklore. From this, an anthology emerged, 2021’s Fire Draw Near – An Anthology of Traditional Irish Song and Music’, released on Rough Trade’s River Lea imprint, which KLOF Magazine called “an important and commendable collection of Irish songs and tunes.”

Describing the process of working with Ian Lynch, Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi, A.K.A. VARO, say: “It was an absolute pleasure to collaborate with Ian on ‘Sweet Liberty’. When he suggested this song for the project, we loved it straight away. It carries a powerful anti- racist message and a call to unite people. 

“As we began working on it, it became clear that the lyrics were so powerful that the arrangement didn’t need to be overly intricate. Instead, we focused on creating an open space where these words could truly resonate.

“For the final line of the song, we chose to shift the harmony to a minor key. There is quite a bitterness in knowing that such a song was written 200 years ago and still, the need for these words to be sung and repeated today is depressingly vivid.”

Ian Lynch says of ‘Sweet Liberty’: “The poet and weaver John Sheil had perhaps the biggest impact of any songwriter in 19th Century Ireland and many of his songs are still extant in the oral tradition, especially in and around Drogheda where he died in 1872. This song was learned from the singing of Pat Usher of Tinure, Co. Louth in the 1970s and it appears on a 3 CD release entitled The Usher Family, which came out in 2019. I first heard it here and was particularly taken by its humanitarian message of racial equality and freedom of all from oppression. It is quite remarkable that it was written in Ireland in the 1800s.”

On working with VARO, Lynch says: “This one was a real pleasure to work on and to this day one of my favourite memories of lockdown was cycling out to Consuelo and Lucy during endless hot summer days to sit in the kitchen and get lost in the harmonies to this song.”