Altan

One of Ireland's foremost traditional groups, Altan first emerged in the early '90s with a sound that heavily featured the Irish-language songs and dynamic twin-fiddling style of their native Donegal and continued to take it to the world stage with a string of successful releases, first for the Celtic-oriented Green Linnet label, and later on Virgin, Narada, and Compass Records. Employing fiddle, flute, guitars, accordion, bouzouki, and the lilting bilingual vocals of Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Altan has built and maintained a global audience through decades of widespread touring and recorded highlights like 1993's Island Angel, 2002's The Blue Idol, and 2015's exploratory Celtic-American fusion album The Widening Gyre. Despite their various collaborations and experiments outside their core genre, Altan have remained steadfastly devoted to the traditional music of Ireland, with frequent emphasis on their native Northern Irish region of Donegal, which they honored on the 2024 album Donegal.