Breabach

Breabach wove together the core strands of Celtic folk—pipes, whistles, flutes, fiddles, and traditional dance—into a sound that earned swift acclaim and multiple honors. Their first major breakthrough arrived with the 2005 Danny Kyle Open Stage Award at the Celtic Connections Festival, which secured a recording contract with Vertical Records the next year. Ahead of any album release, the quartet received a nomination for Best Up and Coming Band at the 2006 Scots Traditional Music Awards. Their debut full-length, The Big Spree, arrived in 2007 to favorable notices and prompted an immediate round of live dates. The following year the lineup of Donal Brown (pipes, flute, whistles, stepdance), Calum MacCrimmon (pipes, whistles, vocals), Patsy Reid (fiddle, vocals), and Ewan Robertson (guitar, vocals) completed a Welsh and English tour while scheduling further European shows. Three subsequent studio albums—Desperate Battle of the Birds (2010), Bann (2012), and Ùrlar (2013)—cemented the group’s standing among the leading acts in contemporary U.K. folk. In 2016 they delivered their fifth record, Astar, and captured both “Folk Band of the Year” and “Album of the Year” at the Scots Trad Music Awards.