Belfast-born, Berlin-based artist Mahuna delivers his debut album ‘Forever Is Mine’, which reads like a personal atlas. Each of the ten tracks serves as a breadcrumb trail through decades of life, loss, and quiet revelation.
‘Forever Is Mine’ spans 25 years of writing, but it never feels like a patchwork. Instead, Mahuna threads these snapshots together with a tenderness that feels wholly present. From fog-draped coastlines to hushed city dawns, his world is one of reverence and wonder for so many things.
Opening with ‘The Road I Have Wandered’, Mahuna sets the tone with subdued acoustics and lyrical introspection. It’s a subtle curtain-raiser, steeped in the weight of past choices and a readiness to move forward. There’s a blend of melancholy and grace that recurs throughout, most strikingly on the standout ‘Far-Off Summer’s Night’, which recalls walking home through Monaghan’s fields, an understated tribute to paternal memory and mystery.
The lead single ‘Shimmering Light’ offers a sun-dappled pause. With layered guitar tones and an almost weightless vocal delivery, it gently captures the aching comfort of familial love. “This album is a series of lived moments,” Mahuna explains, and nowhere is that more evident than in tracks like ‘Paris Dawn’, where grief flickers under golden skies, or ‘Hazel Tree’, a grounding meditation on stillness and place.
‘Forever Is Mine’ lives in the space between folk and ambience. Songs like ‘Tear Down the Sails’ gorgeously simmer and sparkle in a Thom Yorke-esque way, while ‘Where the Dark River Meets the Sea’ blends joy and unease, which is scenic and emotionally raw. Each performance was captured live, a decision that brings a subtle volatility to the record, allowing Mahuna’s husky vocal phrasing and acoustic textures to breathe, tremble, and expand naturally.
The album’s closer ‘They Won’t Be Coming Home’ is perhaps the most haunting on this record that already has a strong shadow of things past. It leans into folklore and a maritime lament; it leaves listeners with the echo of unanswered prayers and timeless grief. It’s a fitting finale to an album that’s as much about what’s left unsaid as what’s sung.
For fans of narrative folk, and ambient storytelling that wears its scars like poetry, ‘Forever Is Mine’ is a deeply affecting listen. Mahuna touchingly revisits his past and renders it with such warmth and texture, you feel like you’ve lived it too.
