Declan O'Rourke Oceanic album and Vicar Street Dublin 2026
After years spent on novels rather than songs, the Galway-based songwriter returns with a piano-led record cut in Sydney and steps onto a Dublin stage the same month it lands.
Declan O'Rourke has released Oceanic, his first album since Arrivals in 2021, and plays Vicar Street in Dublin on 17 October 2026. The Dublin-born, Galway-based singer-songwriter spent several years away from music after that earlier record. In the gap he published two novels, The Pawnbroker’s Reward and A Whisper From Oblivion, and left songwriting aside almost entirely.
“For a while, music simply wasn’t my daily MO. I didn’t write anything musical for two or three years,” he said. The break was not a quiet pause between singles so much as a change of working life. When he came back to the craft, the record that followed was shaped by new instruments, a new room and a producer with a long rock pedigree of his own.
Sydney, piano and a hard song
O’Rourke recorded Oceanic in Sydney at the home studio of Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie. Moginie assembled a band around the songs and produced the album. The setting matters: this is not a quick Dublin session squeezed between gigs, but a full body of work made far from home, under another musician’s roof, with a group put together for the project.
It is also O’Rourke’s first album to feature extensive piano. He had acquired a Blüthner instrument, and the keys sit at the centre of the new writing in a way they had not on earlier records. For a songwriter long associated with guitar and voice, that shift is part of what Oceanic is — not a change of genre so much as a change of how the songs are built and voiced.
One track, ‘The Magic Road To Anywhere’, deals with a childhood friend’s addiction struggles. It almost did not make the record. That the song survived the cut says something about the tone of the album: O’Rourke is not dressing the return as pure celebration. The writing still carries weight, and the decision to keep a difficult song in the running is part of the craft on show.
Oceanic is out now. Five years separate it from Arrivals. Between those two albums sits the novel-writing stretch, the silence in the notebooks, and the decision to start again with piano and a producer on the other side of the world.
Vicar Street on release month
The Vicar Street date lands in the same month as the album. For an Irish audience that has followed O’Rourke from the earlier records through the long gap, the night is the first full chance to hear the new songs on a Dublin stage rather than through the finished mixes alone. The venue has long been a natural room for this kind of work — close enough for the voice and the piano to land, large enough for a band assembled around the material.
What the set will lean on is not yet spelled out in detail, but the logic of the date is clear enough. Oceanic is the body of work; Vicar Street is where it meets a home crowd in the weeks after release. After a stretch when music was not the daily practice, the combination of a finished album and a major Dublin gig marks the return in both forms at once — on record and on stage.
O’Rourke’s path back has been deliberate: novels first, then the Blüthner, then Sydney with Moginie, then the hard song kept on the album, then the room on Abbey Street. Oceanic stands as the musical statement after the silence. The Vicar Street show is where that statement is played live, on the day the calendar has given him, with the new songs still fresh in the air.
Tour dates
OCTOBER 2026
17 – Dublin, Vicar Street
22 – Wexford, Wexford Spiegeltent Festival
NOVEMBER 2026
7 – Co. Kerry, Gleneagle Arena
“For a while, music simply wasn’t my daily MO. I didn’t write anything musical for two or three years,” he said. The break was not a quiet pause between singles so much as a change of working life. When he came back to the craft, the record that followed was shaped by new instruments, a new room and a producer with a long rock pedigree of his own.
Sydney, piano and a hard song
O’Rourke recorded Oceanic in Sydney at the home studio of Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie. Moginie assembled a band around the songs and produced the album. The setting matters: this is not a quick Dublin session squeezed between gigs, but a full body of work made far from home, under another musician’s roof, with a group put together for the project.
It is also O’Rourke’s first album to feature extensive piano. He had acquired a Blüthner instrument, and the keys sit at the centre of the new writing in a way they had not on earlier records. For a songwriter long associated with guitar and voice, that shift is part of what Oceanic is — not a change of genre so much as a change of how the songs are built and voiced.
One track, ‘The Magic Road To Anywhere’, deals with a childhood friend’s addiction struggles. It almost did not make the record. That the song survived the cut says something about the tone of the album: O’Rourke is not dressing the return as pure celebration. The writing still carries weight, and the decision to keep a difficult song in the running is part of the craft on show.
Oceanic is out now. Five years separate it from Arrivals. Between those two albums sits the novel-writing stretch, the silence in the notebooks, and the decision to start again with piano and a producer on the other side of the world.
Vicar Street on release month
The Vicar Street date lands in the same month as the album. For an Irish audience that has followed O’Rourke from the earlier records through the long gap, the night is the first full chance to hear the new songs on a Dublin stage rather than through the finished mixes alone. The venue has long been a natural room for this kind of work — close enough for the voice and the piano to land, large enough for a band assembled around the material.
What the set will lean on is not yet spelled out in detail, but the logic of the date is clear enough. Oceanic is the body of work; Vicar Street is where it meets a home crowd in the weeks after release. After a stretch when music was not the daily practice, the combination of a finished album and a major Dublin gig marks the return in both forms at once — on record and on stage.
O’Rourke’s path back has been deliberate: novels first, then the Blüthner, then Sydney with Moginie, then the hard song kept on the album, then the room on Abbey Street. Oceanic stands as the musical statement after the silence. The Vicar Street show is where that statement is played live, on the day the calendar has given him, with the new songs still fresh in the air.
Tour dates
OCTOBER 2026
17 – Dublin, Vicar Street
22 – Wexford, Wexford Spiegeltent Festival
NOVEMBER 2026
7 – Co. Kerry, Gleneagle Arena
