The Irish singer-songwriter does what the best musicians do: perfectly crystallising their time while inspirationally taking a stand against itWhat has it felt like to be alive in 2025? The basic answer probably touches on a few aspects of the 21st-century experience. One is the horror and conflict that seem to define the news almost every day. Another centres around the material pressures that increasingly grip supposedly peaceful countries: the never-ending cost of living crisis, and the impossibility for millions of people of a secure job, a dependable home and some halfway viable idea of the future.Something else demands a mention: the all-pervading mixture of absurdity, nastiness and anger fostered by the internet. Bigotry runs rampant. What we still rather laughably call social media now seem to operate on the basis that the ideal story mixes wildly improbable elements with the kicking-up of moral outrage (witness that ghoulish “online content creator” Bonnie Blue, who, having...