“I’m just going to read you this Nietzsche quote that I have scribbled down, because it’s brilliant.” Joshua Burnside is sandwiched between an upright piano and all-black walls in his narrow Belfast recording studio, looking a little larger than life in the foreground of my Zoom frame.

“‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers,’” he begins to quote. “‘What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?’”

Even I can’t ignore that Nietzche’s ‘God is dead’ speech is an excellent contextualizer for Burnside’s sophomore album, Into The Depths of Hell. The record – a masterful marriage of traditional folk and experimental alt-rock – is just shy of release, and already earning its creator his well-deserved place among Ireland’s leading troubadours.