A Lilac Decline is the anagrammatic musical pseudonym of visual artist Cecilia Danell. Originally from Sweden but resident in Ireland for two decades, her debut  album The Mountain Rages (Rusted Rail, 2017) was recorded via one microphone on borrowed and found instruments. Whilst there were flashes of electricity on her debut, her follow-up Shelter From the Shadows (2020) found A Lilac Decline going electric, Telecaster in hand, as her sophomore album was shot through with glimmering and shimmering six string serenades. A Lilac Decline’s third album, Eternity Bores Me was released on May 1st 2026, while her label Rusted Rail entered its 20th year of releasing music. Having blossomed into a fully fledged three piece band centred around songwriter Cecilia Danell and rounded out by bassist/producer Keith Wallace (Loner Deluxe) and Brian Kelly (So Cow) on drums, the new album finds A Lilac Decline further evolving their shoegaze and dream pop stylings whilst also displaying flashes of their handmade and homespun indie-folk roots.

What Cecilia Says: “It’s one of my favourite songs off the album. I wrote it while I was on an art residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in a small town in the west of Ireland in November 2021. I’m often directly inspired by things I encounter and I remember: one evening I was looking out the studio window and saw that the sky was absolutely glowing with the most amazing orange and pink hues. It inspired the lines “Clouds on fire in the sky / make these fleeting moments mine“. The rest was built around a melody I’d been tinkering around with on the guitar just before that, I like how it’s lifted by the shoegaze washes on the choruses.” 

“That’s What I’ll Do is a slow burner that takes place this time of year, as that’s the time of year when I wrote it. One evening when cycling home I encountered a city fox under the street lights who shied away from me and disappeared into the shadows. There was something so evocative about that encounter that I wrote a few lines about it into my phone, which later became the lyrics for the song. The melody happened very organically, I started playing a finger-picked pattern on the guitar and Keith Wallace joined in on a little Casio keyboard. We had the melody right there and it fitted the few lines I had about the fox. The song is about thoughts about life, the universe and evenings with lilac blossoms and a fox. The big and small things mixed together, the way life often is. Some time after that we found the fox dead by the roadside, he was so beautiful and it felt quite sad. I haven’t seen a fox in our street since then.“

Her mixtape:

Slowdive – Waves

Slowdive are one of my favourite bands and this is my all time favourite song of theirs. I’ve seen them live twice, at Primavera Sound in Porto and at The National Stadium, Dublin but they never play it live for some reason. It’s one of their early tunes and I guess a lot of bands and artists look back on their early stuff and feel that they were so young back then and that they’re come such a long way since that it no longer feels relevant. But Slowdive; if you’re reading this, please reconsider and include it in your live set! I love to play this really loud, close my eyes and just let the sound wash over me. It’s beautiful!

Snail Mail – Golden Dream

Snail Mail is Lindsey Jordan, a contemporary artist with a definite 90’s vibe. I was in Chicago recently and it coincided with her gig there at the Riviera Theatre. It was really great to see her live and she has a new album out that I recommend you check out. This song is from her first album, which she released in 2018 when she was only 18. It has a youthful urgency to it that I really like and a vibe you just wanna bop along to. This song has this kind of defiance about it too: “I’m not yours/ Know when I mean it/ I’m not wasted anymore“. I was hoping she’d play the song live when I saw her, but she didn’t!

Adrianne Lenker – anything

Adrianne Lenker is also in the band Big Thief, who I really like and had heard before I first discovered her solo stuff during the Covid era. She recorded the album ‘songs’ which this tune is taken from, in a wooden cabin in Massachusetts in 2020 using analogue equipment and letting the sound of rain and bird song filter into the recording. She even used pine tree branches to create soft swishy percussion at times. When I heard this album upon its release it blew me away as its quiet, intimate feel completely described that point in time for me. The second disc of the album contains semi-improvised instrumentals. I was happy to pick it up on vinyl when I saw Big Thief live in Dublin in 2022.

My Bloody Valentine – I Only Said

I love My Bloody Valentine so no list would be complete without them on it. I had seen them play in a hangar at Templehof Airport at the Berlin Festival in 2013 just after mbv came out and it was amazing, so when it was announced that they would play Dublin in November ’25 I had to go! My friends helped me get hold of a ticket as they had access to a presale, it was a huge scramble even then as it was the first show of theirs to be announced since 2018. The week of the gig I happened to be working in Dublin on an art project, and my partner Keith alerted me to an email from the promoter of a mystery event taking place where the background image resembled Loveless. I got hold of a ticket and it turned out to be a secret rehearsal gig by the band at the National Stadium, a much smaller indoor venue than the arena they were billed to play later that week. I ended up at the railings right in front of Belinda Butcher and it was a totally wild experience to see them play that up close. Kevin Shields came onto the stage at the start and said “Thanks for coming along to our rehearsal” and then they launched into this song. I stood right at the speakers and the sound just washed right over me, what a thrill! The arena gig was great too but nothing beats that secret gig for me.

Yo La Tengo – More Stars Than There Are in Heaven

I first came across Yo La Tengo in 2009 before streaming was really a thing, so I didn’t quite know where to start with them. I decided to ask to get their latest record on vinyl for Christmas that year, so the first album of theirs that I ever heard was ‘Popular Songs’ (2009). Since then I’ve accumulated a number of their albums, seen them live a couple of times and determined that their best albums are probably ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’ (2000) and ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating as One’ (1997) and not Popular Songs, unless you consider the second disc, which consists of three really long, mostly instrumental tunes. ‘More Stars Than There Are in Heaven’ is the first tune on disc 2 and it’s magnificent! I Iove the slow building expansiveness of it. I think it’s about walking through life hand in hand with the person you love, and that having someone else by your side makes facing the things the world throws at you a bit more bearable. “We’ll walk hand in hand / Never as we planned / And even those we never knew / Fast they disappear from view / Fading world without a price / Right before our very eyes / Melts before our very eyes”. It’s a song with great emotional depth for me. 

Eternity Bores Me is out now via Rusted Rail. Look HERE for more information on A Lilac Decline.