An idiosyncratic, challenging and richly lyrical singer/ songwriter, Junior Brother is the pseudonym of Co. Kerry, Ireland singer Ronan Kealy. Chosen as The Irish Times’ Best Irish Act of 2019 and nominated for the 2019 Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year, Junior Brother has built a rabid following thanks to unmissable live shows, and music both excitingly forward-looking and anciently evocative. His strange stories unfold with reckless abandon upon a distinctive guitar and foot tambourine accompaniment, influenced as much by the avant-garde as music from the Middle Ages and his home place in rural Ireland.

In addition to earning a Choice Music Prize nomination, Junior Brother's trailblazing debut album “Pull The Right Rope”, also saw Kealy garner two nominations at the 2019 RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards, for Best Folk Album and Best Emerging Folk Act. Similarly, vigorous approval from modern-day Irish figureheads such as the Rubberbandits and Cillian Murphy has furthered Junior Brother's stock, the latter playing Junior Brother several times on his BBC Radio 6 Music Show. Along-side further airplay, his television performances include appearances on RTÉ’s the Tommy Tiernan show, Other Voices and the Choice Music Prize Awards night in Vicar Street.
Following a landmark debut album, Irish Alt-Folk act Junior Brother's "The Great Irish Famine" leaps boldly forward into an exciting new chapter, and into a shaken new world - staggeringly profound, brutally beautiful and "Truly unforgettable" (MOJO Magazine).
"I was very conscious to bring each element of the debut into this follow-up, but dramatically dig ten times deeper and stretch ten times further down into each avenue" explains Junior Brother, a.k.a. Ronan Kealy. The towering, bruised catharsis of lead single "No Snitch" soars amidst darkly comic self-reflection ("This Is My Body"), anxious reflexes on modern living ("No Country For Young Men"), and the painful role the past plays in a nation's present ("King Jessup's Nine Trials").
Both startlingly dynamic and profoundly accomplished, "The Great Irish Famine" mounts its "Wry songs of anxiety and frustration" (The Guardian) to the fall-out of trauma both national and international, minor and mountainous, historic and contemporary - all uncompromisingly conveyed through the magnetic, stunningly potent vision of a one-of-a-kind artist at the top of his game.