There’s a particular kind of quiet that arrives before a turning point — not the peaceful kind, but the charged, disorienting hush that forces you to listen inward. For SOAK — the Irish singer‑songwriter Bridie Monds‑Watson — that silence wasn’t metaphorical. It was real, physical, and frightening. An autoimmune disease stripped away their ability to sing, leaving a void where their voice, livelihood, and identity once lived.
Out of that void comes decembers, SOAK’s new album arriving December 4, 2026 via Rough Trade Records. It’s the most expansive, searching, and emotionally intricate work of their career — a record shaped by movement, memory, and the slow, brave act of becoming someone new.
decembers feels like a travelogue written in the margins of recovery. We follow SOAK through America’s wide‑open roads, along frost‑lit Dublin streets, under Portuguese skies hunting meteors, and finally back home to Derry. Each place becomes a waypoint in a larger internal map — one charting grief, release, and the tentative joy of returning to oneself.
The album’s title track, shared today with a visualizer, sets the tone: spacious, reflective, quietly devastating. It’s SOAK at their most vulnerable, but also their most assured. The absence of sound — that forced stillness — has sharpened everything. Lyrics land heavier. Melodies feel braver. There’s a sense of someone rebuilding their voice from the ground up.
Monds‑Watson anchors the album’s emotional core in a quote from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, a meditation on the impossibility of returning to the past. “For a long time I wanted to disprove that concept,” they say. “Maybe the familiarity of before felt safe. In the end I realised that was no way to live… In a way, I think decembers is about forgiveness”
It’s a striking sentiment, and one that threads through every song.
SOAK has never been an artist who stands still. From their Mercury‑nominated debut Before We Forgot How to Dream to the raw introspection of Grim Town and the guitar‑driven warmth of 2022’s If I Never Know You Like This Again, each era has reshaped their sound without losing the emotional clarity at the centre.
Recent years have widened their reach even further: the viral Fred Again.. collaboration just stand there (now over 25 million plays), the standalone single death valley fridge magnet, and extensive touring across the US and Europe, including Glastonbury, SXSW, Primavera, Other Voices, and support slots for Julien Baker, Modest Mouse, Lucy Dacus, Pulp, The Lumineers and more.
decembers feels like the culmination of all of this, not a pivot, but a deepening.
SOAK heads to America this autumn supporting The Barr Brothers, including a stop at NYC’s Bowery Ballroom. Then, in February 2027, they embark on a newly announced headline UK and EU tour, with tickets on sale Friday, October 2nd at 10am local time.
It’s a fitting return to the stage: an artist who lost their voice now stepping back into rooms full of people ready to hear what came out of the silence.
This album marks a moment of transformation — not dramatic, not explosive, but quietly radical. It’s SOAK learning to let go of the past, to forgive themselves, and to move forward with a voice that has been tested, reshaped, and ultimately strengthened.
For longtime fans, decembers will feel like a homecoming to a version of SOAK that’s both familiar and newly illuminated. For newcomers, it’s a stunning entry point into one of Ireland’s most distinctive and emotionally resonant artists.
Tracklisting:
01) decembers
02) death valley fridge magnet
03) speed
04) woodstock
05) minus 3
06) subaru
07) backroads
08) transmitter park
09) closing down
Tour Dates
October 28 - Brattleboro, VT @ The Stone Church^
October 29 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom^
October 30 - Providence, RI @ The Met^
February 5 - Newcastle, UK @ The Cluny
February 6 - Sheffield,UK @ Hallamshire Hotel
February 7 - Manchester, UK @ YES, Pink Room
February 9 - Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
February 10 - London, UK @ Bush Hall
February 11 - Leeds, UK @ Hyde Park Book Club
February 13 - Glasgow, UK @ King Tut's Wah Wah Hut
February 17 - Belfast, IE @ Empire
February 18 - Dublin, IE @ Button Factory
February 19 - Limerick, IE @ Dolan's
February 20 - Cork, IE @ St Luke's
February 24 - Paris, FR @ Le Hasard Ludique
February 25 - Antwerp, BE @ Trix
February 26- Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
February 28 - Berlin, DE @ Mikropol
^ = w/ The Barr Brothers
