The Mary Wallopers

The repertoire of this 2010s-formed Irish folk act is steeped in traditional material popularized by the likes of the Dubliners, the Clancy Brothers, and the Chieftains. However, far from treating the folk idiom as unrealistic sacred territory, the Dundalk, County Louth group perform with a mischievous warts-and-all honesty reminiscent of Shane MacGowan’s punk-injected Pogues. Brothers Charles and Andrew Hendy were born in the mid-’90s in a local town called Dunleer. They were raised on folk music, with their sister often singing to their father’s accordion accompaniment. When they reached their twenties, the pair moved north to Dundalk, sharing a house with their friend Sean McKenna. Unemployed and low on money, the trio began to play folk songs in local pubs for drinks. All three sang and played guitar, but the younger Hendy brother, Andrew, soon progressed to the tenor banjo. In addition to these formative crosstown folk adventures, the Hendy brothers’ side project — a political comedy rap duo named TPM — suddenly went viral in 2015 with “All the Boys on the Dole.” Although TPM continued to produce a song a year for the remainder of the decade, the folk group they’d formed with McKenna was always their primary concern. Billed as the Mary Wallopers — after a small rowboat at the local docks emblazoned with its name — they got their first paying gig in 2016. Over the next three years, they continued to hone their craft and maintain the Irish tradition of pub performance. In 2019, the band self-released a debut EP, A Mouthful of the Mary Wallopers, produced, mixed, and performed by Mícheál Keating of Bleeding Heart Pigeons and respectively featuring Sárán and Tadhg Mulligan on concertina and fiddle. The raw, five-track record was mainly comprised of traditional folk songs, but its bawdy lead track — Ron Clark & Carl MacDougall’s “Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice,” popularized by Hamish Imlach in the ’60s — was a rambling tale in which the Mary Wallopers found their identity. 2020′s COVID-19 lockdowns gave them an opportunity to host a series of online shows named Stay at Home with the Mary Wallopers, and by the end of the pandemic, their channel had 40,000 followers. After completing an early 2022 U.K. and Ireland tour, the Mary Wallopers gathered numerous players at the Chris Barry-produced sessions for their debut, self-titled album. Two of these musicians — the jazz-rooted bassist Róisín Barrett, and the more traditionally minded tin whistle and Uilleann pipes player, Finnian O'Connor — became core members of the band. The record charted momentarily in Scotland and Ireland that November, by which point drummer Brendan McInerney and accordionist Seamus Hyland had also joined the fold, completing their septet in time for a Europe-wide tour. April 2023 saw the release of their single, “The Holy Ground,” the first fruit of the Mary Wallopers’ sophomore album. Containing three original compositions — “The Idler,” “Vultures of Christmas,” and “Gates of Heaven” — among the traditional fare, October 2023′s Irish Rock 'n' Roll hit number two on both the Irish and Scottish charts and became the band’s U.K. chart debut. ~ James Wilkinson