Hurray For The Riff Raff returns to Ireland for a highly anticipated headline at Button Factory, Dublin Friday, 10th May 2024 

Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Alynda Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalised before they were a teenager, baptised in the anti-war movement and galvanised in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces.

Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement. But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch Records debut. 

In March 2023, when Segarra returned to the North Carolina studio of producer Brad Cook to cut upcoming record The Past Is Still Alive, they weren’t so sure about the session, if they could even handle it. Only a month before, their father, Jose Enrique (Quico) Segarra, had died. A musician himself, he had long been fundamental to Segarra’s songs, a point of inspiration and encouragement.

Segarra simply let those complex feelings lead the way, hurling themselves into these excavations of memory and blueprints for what’s to come. Witness, for instance, the tensile resolve in opener “Alibi,” a yearning reflection on addicted childhood friends that pleads with them to join the land of the living while they still can. As the pedal steel moans beneath the snappy country shuffle, their voice frays, a testament to the way they’re bearing difficult witness.