We Speak Pop

Soda Blonde release cinematic new single ‘Midnight Show’, taken from their highly anticipated sophomore album ‘Dream Big’, out September 8th.

Published

3 years ago

September 1, 2023

Don Reed

“Dream Big”, the second studio album from Irish band Soda Blonde, is far more than a collection of catchy and cathartic pop songs; it’s a mantra – a mission statement from four lifelong friends. It’s their promise to themselves, and a message to all who come along for the ride: A reminder that life is precious, fragile, and fleeting, so we might as well dream big and hold nothing back. Epic in size and intimate in scope, “Dream Big” holds a microscope in one hand and a mirror in the other as our innermost thoughts and feelings get a soundtrack of their very own.

Following two successful introductory EPs (2019’s “Terrible Hands” and 2020’s “Isolation Content”), they released their debut album, “Small Talk”, in 2021. The LP was subsequently nominated for RTÉ’s Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year and received rave reviews from Paste Magazine, Atwood Magazine, and The Irish Times, who called it “a record so articulate and expressive that its title has to be a wry in-joke.”

Soda Blonde have grown tremendously in the two years since their debut, and it shows. Whereas “Small Talk” was an anxiety-fuelled coming-of-age record about navigating their twenties, “Dream Big” is a mature awakening to the world at large; one that dives deeper and hits harder than its predecessor.

The band set the tone on album opener “Midnight Show,” a stunningly cinematic power ballad weighing disillusionment with the music industry on one hand, and the unapologetic pursuit of one’s desires on the other. The new single, which Atwood Magazine premiered, has also already been picking up airplay from BBC 6 Music’s Deb Grant & Tom Ravenscroft and been added to the Amazing Radio A-List. This follows a plethora of love for previous single “Bad Machine” from the likes of Wonderland, Nialler 9 & Record Of The Day.

Tickets are on sale now for Soda Blonde’s November ‘Dream Big’ tour.

We Speak Entertainment

IRENE MICHAELS JOINS THE RECORDING ACADEMY — AND WHAT THAT VOTE ACTUALLY MEANS

Published

7 days ago

August 25, 2026

Jimmy Star

Awards nominations tell an audience an artist’s work has been noticed. Recording Academy Voting Membership tells a different story: that the artist has been recognized as a peer within the industry itself. Irene Michaels was recently named a Voting Member of the Recording Academy — the organization behind the Grammy Awards — and the distinction carries weight well beyond a title on a bio page.

Voting Membership isn’t handed out casually. It’s reserved for performers, songwriters, producers, engineers, and other creators actively working in the recording industry, and it comes with real influence: Voting Members are the people who ultimately determine Grammy nominees and winners each year. For an artist to be recognized at that level is, in effect, the industry saying her work belongs in the same conversation as the artists and professionals shaping the awards themselves.

That’s a meaningful marker for Michaels’ ongoing music career, which has moved from EPs and singles to Josie Music Award recognition and now into this kind of institutional standing. It reframes her not just as an artist building a catalog, but as a working member of the community that evaluates and honors that catalog industry-wide — someone whose judgment on music now carries an official vote.

It also adds context to everything else happening in her 2026: a triple nomination at the 12th Annual Josie Music Awards, an EP in Golden that’s earning recognition on its own merits, and a career that has spent the last several years steadily building credibility as a serious recording artist rather than a novelty comeback story. Recording Academy membership doesn’t arrive for artists still proving themselves — it arrives for artists the industry has already decided are part of it.

For Irene Michaels, whose career has spanned modeling, acting, publishing, and now music across multiple decades, the Recording Academy recognition is less a single headline than another data point in a larger pattern: an artist whose reinvention keeps being met, at every stage, with the industry taking her seriously.