Photo by Chris Albo
We sit down with the artist formerly known as Bearface ahead of his solo debut album, 'Róisín,' to talk about finding freedom in songwriting, life post-boyband, drawing inspiration from D’Angelo and Prince, and refusing to let the industry steal his joy.
October 14, 2026
BY Alex Siber
The best way to pay tribute to artists you love is to be inspired by them and then let everyone know it. That’s how you pass it on, particularly for musicians who’ve passed away.
It’s okay to take your time. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy or don’t want it enough [...] I gave myself the chance to ask, ‘Do I still like this?’ And make things 10 times better.
I understand it can feel scary to make your political positions known in music, but there’s strength in numbers, and this is the least we can do as artists.
In a humiliation ritual that exposed ligaments and bone marrow to the Andes’ Puelche winds, the Europeans cut clean through Galvarino’s wrists for attempting ‘rebellion.’
Undeterred, the warrior ordered his brothers in arms to affix blades to what remained of his limbs. The pride of Chile’s Wallmapu lands returned to battle, like a decolonial Edward Scissorhands, against the invading Spaniards, who had waged a war of extermination against his native Mapuche people. He vowed to fight for liberation until death or capture. The latter led to the former.
Some say the conquistadors fed him to the dogs. Others claim a noose stole his last breath. Yet his legend lives on nearly 500 years later through, among other things, the rainforest-lush debut album of Ciarán, FKA Bearface, whose second-ever solo single derives its name from the resistance icon. It’s just one of the many imaginative forays taken (and political threads spun) by the proudly Irish alum of an all-American* boyband. (His parents still debate whether he’s named after Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise or Ciarán Fitzgerald, the Irish rugby player.) Throughout Róisín, out November 6 on Ninja Tune, he discards all-about-me-me-me pop writing in favor of loose character studies, anti-autobiographical fragments, and 21st-century-Soulquarian experimentation.
Long framed as a hooded enigma with a heartthrob voice, the ex-‘shyest guy’ in an ultra-animated group is, in fact, an affable open book across five hours of conversation. It’s not just with me, either; he recently trusted a complete stranger with confidential rollout information during a sidewalk run-in, only to see it surface, garbled, on Reddit soon after. (If the snitch is reading this: Ciarán wants you to know it’s OK. Just keep it between you guys next time.) On wax, the pages he’s reading from increasingly tell tales beyond his own.
“People think that music has to be a diary,” he tells me as we brave the increasingly tick-infested grasses of a New York park in early September, praying for mercy from the lone stars. “It wasn’t obvious to me until this album that you can write about anything. That by virtue of you writing it, a piece of you will be there. And even if it’s not about your own life, it can still be true and honest. The title ‘Galvarino’ has little relation to what’s inside the song, but his story still inspired me enough to give it that name.” In the music video, edited by Ciarán himself, clips gesture toward another rebellion: one against the modern surveillance state.
Did you expect a profile of Ciarán to kick off with war lore? Did I anticipate that the source of BROCKHAMPTON’s most sugar-sweet intonations would return with a website that looks and sounds like a spectral collision recorded via EMF meter, automobile shrapnel batting leadoff in this new visual era? How about his debut release, “K-Bar,” which greeted the devoted holdouts with a 26-second intro that could score the Industrial Revolution’s underbelly before acquiescing, offering up melodic emissions that melt you away?
“I thought it’d be fun if anyone who stuck around gets to that ‘K-Bar’ intro and is like, ‘What the f*ck is this?’ My team wanted me to post snippets before the album came out, but I didn’t want there to be any inkling of what the rest of the project was like. Even with the singles, I wanted people to hear them all and still think, ‘What could this possibly sound like altogether?’”
Róisín’s waveforms hint at the answer. They crest higher and higher, flatline, then rise again; atypical rock formations scraping the clouds until a sudden collapse. Opener “Crown” begins as a winter-cold omen. Daniel Chae’s strings slash in and out like scythes under snowfall before Ciarán’s voice, that voice, catapults skyward like a geyser of liquid silver, tracing the contrails of Prince and D’Angelo’s immortal flight paths. External events again drive the song’s concept.
“In my head, ‘Crown’ is medieval. A lot of people became kings really young. Their dad would die in battle and they’re anointed by God to take charge of the entire land. You bury your father in the midst of violence and all of this responsibility gets thrust upon you. It’s terrifying. imagine being a 12-year-old heir. You’re like, ‘Holy f*ck, I’m 12.’ Don’t let me ruin it though. Interpret it however you want,” Ciarán says with a smile.
The album’s second song, “Loom,” crafted alongside Roy Blair, sees Ciarán again looking beyond himself for storytelling ignition. Written with Björk’s voice in mind, it finds him singing as a thread that lovingly serenades its weaver. Not sinister, but sweet, the way we tend to anthropomorphize things. Another track, “Chevy,” which sounds smoother than the two hands of a Galway claddagh ring caressing each other until their palm grooves merge, originated when Ciarán learned that a friend was getting married.
“I wrote that one for their wedding without telling them,” he says, beaming with mischief.
And then there’s the dove-soft hook on track three, “K-Bar,” that quickly had the internet nattering: “We could both be girls.” He intends it less as overt commentary on gender fluidity than an attempt at narrative boundlessness. When we speak on it, he points to a top-five Prince line (“I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something you will never understand”) and Prince’s shelved alter-ego project, Camille, as true freedom.
“Someone told me that André 3000 would get through writer’s block by pretending to write a song as someone else,” he adds. “It’s disarming and inspiring to hop out of your usual form.”
You may know by now that, had he popped out as a girl, Ciarán’s mother would have named him Róisín. Either way, she was going to put her child onto Prince. MTV presented the opportunity. Eons ago, when the station decided to program reruns of his 1986 classic “Kiss,” Mrs. McDonald directed her son’s attention to the screen and ensured he didn’t miss a beat. His first exposure to the crop-top-donning supple superstar, twisting and turning across the set into a state of peak androgyny, planted a seed that sprouted when he attended Belfast Met, a technical college in Northern Ireland. There, fate delivered him a true Prince apostle turned university professor.
“He shared all this lore, everything he had in the vault, about Prince,” Ciarán remembers. “He was like, ‘He played everything! He made everything! He’s an insane guitar player! Watch this video!’ The teacher told us a story about Prince live in Belfast, maybe at Ulster Hall. He’s trying to get the audience to clap along and everyone is so offbeat. Prince goes, ‘Y’all European people never know how to clap right! Alright! Stop the music! Everyone, follow me! One! Two!’So that’s really when my interest crystallized.”
“If I Was Your Girlfriend” (the acknowledged impetus for “K-Bar”), “I Would Die 4 U,” and D’Angelo’s Voodoo indeed illuminate Róisín’s firmament. And although he and Dijon may cover The Purple One at karaoke together (usually “Little Red Corvette,” with Abhi Raju manning the background vocals), they both draw from enough far-flung influences, when paired with their own tones and ingenuity, to push the art from indebted to additive.
“The best way to pay tribute to artists you love is to be inspired by them and then let everyone know it. That’s how you pass it on, particularly for musicians who’ve passed away. So more people can discover their music too and appreciate it with you. You hear stories about how Voodoo came together: D’Angelo and them would go through every Prince album, searching for moments, watching live recordings, until one part caught their ears and they’d start jamming. You’ll hear Black Messiah demos and it’s a freaky jam that turns into a cover of ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden. Prince was studying Sly and James Brown and Jimi Hendrix. It’d be silly to act like any of this is your own genius creation.”
Ciarán pulls more sonic serendipity into his orbit. Not long after Alive Since Forever rebranded as BROCKHAMPTON and joined ranks in San Marcos, Texas, their across-the-pond crooner relocated to Anguilla and Barbados in 2015 and 2016. Time on the isles increased his proximity to both the group itself and Caribbean soundscapes. Listeners will notice a signature siren audio motif lifted from dancehall and dub (and J Dilla) on “Houston.” There’s also a regional genre shoutout in the name of the track “Bashment,” which one of our other favorite new artists, James Ivy, lent his talents to. (“He always takes chords in a direction that just makes you go, Woah.”)
“Galvarino” features a prominent sample from Blackstar, aka Congo Natty, who developed a raga strain of jungle (and one of Ciarán’s favorite albums ever) on Tribute to Emperor Tribute to Haile Selassie I. That project’s frenetic stream of samples, which Ciarán adoringly calls a radio mix spamming the f*ck out of you, loomed large over Róisín and the music direction for Ciarán’s first solo show at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church—rehearsed, much to his chagrin, for a week above a metal and punk venue. The consistent use of tape delay also ties back to these references. Remixing, after all, is how he got here: Ciarán ended up in BROCKHAMPTON because he and Romil bonded over producing bootleg takes of A$AP Rocky joints.
Ciarán’s former roommate and close collaborator boylife set another tenet of the album in motion by sending him down gear rabbit holes. One led to a Japanese firm that specialized in gadgets for noise musicians. Imagine a mic with LFOs, gain, and a kill switch. They’d regularly play Merzbow and Boris in the studio, drawing from the way they marry harsh, abrasive distortion with compositions we’d consider traditionally gorgeous. Contemporary flourishes come by way of an Ouri sample bookending “Loom,” P&P favorite Phoenix James guesting on “Dummy,” and vital input from Blair, Ivy, boylife, and Nick Velez, who together shaped a record of love stories and Springsteenian myths wrapped in uilleann pipes from the motherland.
“I know there’s some irony in me saying this, because I love to work alone,” he says, “but I never would have finished this album without my friends.”
Rewind to Los Angeles. After BROCKHAMPTON disbanded but before he found his solo stride, Ciarán successfully kept external encouragement to cash in on hype at arm’s length. Defusing the self-imposed pressure came less easily. Every session carried a do-or-die weight. If opening Logic didn’t yield an immaculate record (lyrics, melody, sound design, and all), he thought of it in terms of “total failure.”
“I’d be like, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know how to write songs. This f*cking sucks.’ I’d get completely lost in Second Verse Syndrome. Back when I only had five songs and just two were complete, I’d focus on improving half-finished ideas and feel like they were getting worse and start to freak out. Like, ‘If I cut this, I’m down a song, and then I only have four, so do I even have an album?’ And you get stuck thinking that because you put so many hours into something, it has to work, but it’s a sunk cost.”
In that sense, the fearful prophecy of an eternal post-band silence almost came true. So how did Ciarán break through?
“Ryan [boylife] and I started separating everything into its respective parts. The first thing is some chordal information, even if it’s just a bass line. I’d focus on getting a rough structure and melodies done at the start. It’s okay if I move it around later or it’s untraditionally arranged. I could sit with that demo for ages and I wouldn’t have a problem going back to it because I could see the finished thing from that initial sketch. Enough for me to know what I’m going for. And then that’d let me spend a week on lyrics if I wanted to. Same for the vocal performance and sound design. It leaves me room to have fun and push past the second verse hump.”
Photo by Jack McKain
He also pulled some major lessons from the boyband days, despite opting out of the pass-the-mic recording circles of that era. (I can remember Romil trying to put one on wheels so they could slide it across the floor of their early Los Angeles home.) Chief among them: (1) only do what’s in service of the song; (2) try anything.
“For the Saturation albums, Iridescence, and some of Ginger, we all recognized we were just one piece of a puzzle,” he says. “For those albums, Ian [Kevin Abstract] was the filter. Everyone would get their say and contribute anything they wanted, no matter how dumb it might seem, which helped us feel comfortable and unjudged and not be so precious for a long time. Then Kevin would figure out the final form. Being okay with being a cog was a crucial part of making a ‘good’ record, even if that meant removing my part for negative space. It worked really well until it didn’t, especially at the pace we were obligated to create under RCA. As you age, even if you know you need to play your part, it can hurt when a verse you’re proud of gets cut. We’re humans and you can take it personally. To avoid that, less parts get cut, so songs become bloated. I don’t think anyone from the group would disagree with that. A small part of you is like, ‘I’m a grown man.’ [Laughs] People butt heads and you start thinking about doing your own thing, even if you don’t want to admit it.”
Just in case this prompts assumptions of bad blood: Kevin, Romil, and Matt Champion all heard early versions of Róisín. (Ciarán would’ve attended Champion’s recent wedding, and its surprise Emma Ogier performance, if not for an eight-hour flight delay.) Ashlan, the group’s photographer, helped take press photos. His smile nearly makes his cheeks fall off when I play an old clip of him and Joba muttering about Planet Griebus. The dissolution of BROCKHAMPTON was a natural progression, if not overdue, and presented a chance for each member to embrace a cadence that works for them.
“It’s okay to take your time. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy or don’t want it enough. I’d feel so bummed if I released my early solo material. I gave myself the chance to ask, ‘Do I still like this?’ And make things 10 times better. People discount the reflecting part of music and overrate putting your reps in. Not even criticizing the 10,000 hours thing, which is more applicable when you’re trying to learn something and you don’t know how the guitar works. But after you reach that point, I don’t understand treating music like you’re getting in the gym. How many times do you sit in front of the computer with nothing to say and bang your head against the desk? It’s of course a privilege to take time making music. And there’s pride in work. But it’s not right to advance the idea that your only worth as a human is determined by how hard you work, that you need to be some alien freak to succeed. It’s like the billionaires thing. Are they really working harder than a mom with three jobs?”
Some longtime fans may miss the elemental simplicity of Ciarán’s BROCKHAMPTON standouts like “WASTE,” “TEAM,” and other underrated moments. I’ll never forget stumbling across his “Electric Feel” cover nine years ago. But to me, it’s a fair trade for the tesseract vocal arrangements that all but leap out of your headphones. The album’s third single, “Houston,” lays this evolution bare, turning a years-old Ginger-era leak into an all-grown-up aphrodisiac. He blushes as he thinks about his parents hearing the more sensual parts of Róisín for the first time.
Tenderness reigns supreme here, but anguish interrupts it. Allusions to police threats and weapons pockmark the euphoria; noise gashes the romance. Several days after our chat in the grass, he told me over the phone that his approach to creativity boils down to “just feeling pissed.” He reserves particular ire for the noxious fumes of hustle culture and its erosive seepage into every facet of life. The writer Yukio Mishima, who died by seppuku after a failed coup attempt, inflames Ciarán for championing ‘hyper-masculine’ saboteurs who romanticize physiques attained through, or in service of, imperial conquest. A real proto–Andrew T*te type, prevalent in today’s jawline fixations. The mythologizing of the cutting-room floor also drives him up a wall. With Ciarán at the helm as chief filterer, his album’s 13 songs emerged from a total pool of 40. That includes demos with gibberish lyrics. He would like every artist to know that you don’t need to make 1,000 tracks for a project. Ten special songs can become a special 10-song album.
“I’m sure people will see this and say, ‘Didn’t BROCKHAMPTON have hundreds of recordings?’ Yeah dude, do you know how many of us there were? So many boys. And we’d finish entire songs in one take. Four producers, eight vocalists, three designers… Don’t hold one person to that standard.”
Ciarán finished the bulk of Róisín nearly two years ago. The wait stemmed partly from the many months it took to find the right support. Countless label and management meetings would begin with him describing exactly what he wanted, then end with The Professionals telling him he needs to know what he wants. Those office rooms morphed into a twisted game of telephone, as if the air between his larynx and their ears deleted his voice. The magic words they needed to hear proved elusive, causing him to spiral. Now he sees the game cleareyed, outside of the Twilight Zone.
“A lot of the TikTok bubbles are bursting,” he says. “The bigger companies will go to some of my friends and approach them in a way where it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s the big leagues calling. You need us.’ Then you dissect it and it’s like, ‘No, you’re coming to them, actually.’ You’d be mortified by how most of these people talk about music behind closed doors. Just skimming through an album in 45 seconds, saying, ‘Nope, no hits, next.’ That’s how you’re listening? You’ll see them dapping each other up at festivals like, ‘Let’s go get us some signees tonight! Let’s go sign some things!’ It’s embarrassing. Don’t let them steal the f*cking joy from you. I was lucky enough to eventually find people who understood my words and wanted to help.”
Photo by Ashlan
Photo by Lucas Creighton
Photo by Chris Albo
He wears one of his greatest convictions around his neck. A Palestine medallion has cameo’d in every music video and interview he’s shared so far. Ciarán had just turned 21 when the Israeli Occupation Forces launched ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in 2014. Aghast at yet another round of indiscriminate colonial violence (which killed 30 times more Palestinians than Israelis, injured over 11,000 others in Gaza, and decimated civilian infrastructure in the besieged enclave, according to the United Nations), he went from passively supporting the Palestinian cause in Ireland to making it a central lens through which he viewed life.
As we laid in the grass, he received an email confirming that his new label, Ninja Tune, would approve his request to geoblock Róisín from streaming in apartheid Israel, thus joining the No Music For Genocide movement alongside the likes of Lorde, Clairo, Blood Orange, Björk, Kelela, Fontaines D.C., Aminé, Erika de Casier, King Krule, Hayley Williams, and Chanel Beads. His action, inspired by the successful cultural boycotts against apartheid South Africa, comes as apartheid Israel continues its genocide in Gaza while accelerating its barbarous ethnic cleansing campaigns in the occupied West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. He also refuses to work with Shopify. The aim isn’t to evade complicity entirely, an impossible task in modern society, but to work toward strategic, targeted escalations within his own sphere of influence.
“Everyone should do it,” he says of No Music For Genocide. “There has to be an accumulation of acts like this and that’s how impact happens. The BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] Movement works. Our music being there, and the music platforms operating there, normalizes the most heinous human actions of my lifetime. I understand it can feel scary to make your political positions known in music, but there’s strength in numbers, and this is the least we can do as artists. I’d really encourage every single artist reading this to join the campaign. It’s easy and it matters. Palestine is the hot point in the magnifying glass of imperialism. The consequences have been as grave as it gets, and the fact that they’re able to do all of this in our faces and get away with it should be alarming to everyone. It’s not some vaguely ‘sad,’ ‘foreign’ problem. Look, if you follow the trail of money far enough it’ll lead to bad places. I’m not trying to claim that I’m the most noble, principled guy on earth. But in terms of who I work with, I try my best. And at the end of the day, there’s no music to release without us. What are you going to make money from if we hold our art back?”
I make a quarter-joke about royalty-free AI music swiping playlist slots from human artists. Ciarán laughs before pretending he made Róisín with “whatever Fenix Flexin’ used.” His grin U-turns when he recounts how Timbaland, a onetime hero, has used hip-hop’s remix roots to launder the reputations of companies that trained their models on the wholesale theft of millions of songs.
“Making music ‘accessible’ like this to anyone makes it accessible to no one,” he argues. “It goes back to hyper individualism in music. So yeah, click a button and get a sh*tty string section in 20 seconds. Or you could have your violinist friend, like Daniel Chae, and invite them over, have a great time, and make something incredible.”
“You need to have reverence for these different aspects of the process,” he continues. “There’s so much hubris in thinking you can generate a truly special string section when you don’t know a thing about strings. You’re just using the average of everything. It’s not emotional. It’s not the point of doing music. These companies aren’t run by music enjoyers. They’re f*cking idiots. Its utility is meme songs.”
Photo by Lucas Creighton
Ciarán brings a jests-in-the-church-pews levity to even the heaviest subjects with chuckles that function like a yawn: you can’t help but mirror them. He’ll watch the latest Electronic Intifada dispatch over morning coffee and cap the night with a comedy set at an Irish pub named after an IRA general. He tries to be kind while speaking his mind. (“Civil society shouldn’t have space for the kind of hating that me, Dijon, and Abhi [Raju] do. It should be reserved for the dungeon with your friends.”) He has been described as a top-10 all-time chiller.
They also shared that Ciarán got so hooked on boxing it nearly derailed his album. One could argue (and I will) that the bandaged hands on Róisín’s artwork pay tribute to the sport’s least glamorous figures: journeymen, the fighters hired to lose. He tells me about a documentary in which one of them, riled up by a pundit who asserts that ragtag bums staff his line of work, crushes his next opponent outright. Afterwards, the fighter waves off a reporter’s suggestion that he make a real run at going pro. Nobody books the journeyman who keeps winning. The job is to make the hyped, well-sponsored prospect across the ring sweat and learn, collect the check, and move on to the next one. A journeyman's record can read like 11 wins and 115 losses with nary a knockout. You have to be elite to control how you’re defeated.
Boxing’s supposedly second class citizens operate in the same pay-to-play racket as music’s (sell your allotment of tickets or owe the venue), and the journeyman absorbs the cost so the whole ecosystem keeps turning. Ciarán holds equal reverence for the Korean Zombie, the UFC fighter who, outgunned by Max Holloway in his retirement match, chose to go down swinging rather than coast to a decision. Galvarino probably walked back into battle knowing how it would end, too. In this worldview, losing isn’t the opposite of dignity. Quitting is.
Photo by Jack McKain