Heavily touted by critics but not yet quite in the mainstream of Irish music The Remedy Club have the feel of one of those bands that are about to break through and make some real noise.

Consisting of heavily harmonising, folk-loving duo Aileen Mythen and KJ McEvoy, the band have just released their third album ‘true Hand, True Heart’, recorded in Nashville alongside the legendary Grammy award winning producer Ray Kennedy.

I caught up with the pair in the midst of the global shutdown to talk it all over…

First of all, congrats on the album. Can you tell me a little bit of the story behind it?

Aileen: Nashville based producer, Ray Kennedy who had mixed a previous single and mastered our last album ‘Lovers, Legends and Lost Causes’ had chatted to us about the possibility of him producing the next album. We are both big fans of his work and first came across him through one of our all-time favourite Lucinda William’s albums ‘ Car wheels on a gravel road’, which Ray co-produced with Steve Earle and subsequently won a
Grammy for.

We had already written a lot of the songs and raised funds through fundit.ie and knew that Ray would be the right person to produce the album.

Kj: We managed to raise enough money to record the album, although Ray gave us his special ‘living in a dumpster rate’ for broke musicians! We still had to pay for our flights to Nashville but we got there and recorded the album in seven days.

There are some great harmonies on the record. How do you construct those and decide when to use them?

Aileen: We both harmonise naturally together without thinking too much about it. When we are rehearsing a new song the harmonies kind of fit in naturally so we rarely deliberate over it too much. Sometimes we will hit a tricky or unusual harmony that we have to work out.

I guess it’s important to know when not to harmonise too, when one vocal is enough for fear of sounding like ‘The Andrew Sisters’ (who of course were
wonderful but maybe not the right direction for this genre!).

Kj: We’ve both been singing harmonies all our lives so there’s no
‘construction’ required. We generally just sing the most natural-sounding harmony and apply where necessary! Most songs generally lend themselves to harmony although we don’t overdo it. If we decide something needs a three-part harmony for example then there’s a little more construction to it but we rarely do three-part harmonies.