Following the release of their hauntingly cinematic debut album Crossing the Bar, Charles James & The Rise return with their latest single, “About a Cow”, arriving October 21st.
The band’s growing acclaim has seen them perform live on RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday with Miriam, support Gavin James on his Goldrush album launch tour, and take home Music Video of the Year at the 2025 Disappear Here Film Festival for their single Sailor and the Saint.
A standout track from Crossing the Bar, About a Cow is a striking meditation on greed and consumption, told through an unexpected narrator, a cow. “It’s a song that’s had a number of lives and has been with me for a long time,” says Charles James O’Donnell, the band’s frontman and songwriter. “As abstract the notion may seem, the lyrics hit on the sacrifice that’s made in all forms to service greed and the longer term impacts this has”
Set against the band’s trademark blend of cinematic folk and lyrical introspection, About a Cow unfolds like a dark pastoral fable, anchored by Charles’s emotive vocals, Catherine O’Donnell’s plaintive piano, and spectral strings from legendary Waterboys fiddler Steve Wickham and cellist Laura McFadden.
Released September 12th, 2025, Crossing the Bar is the debut full-length from Charles James & The Rise, a widescreen folk odyssey through grief, memory and the tides of loss. Inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem of the same name, the album transforms themes of death and departure into songs of solace and renewal.
Featuring lush instrumentation, cinematic production, and stirring performances, the record has been praised for its emotional honesty and musical depth.