PHOENO are Adam Matthews and Liam Corbett, an independent Dublin duo carving out a distinct pop-electronic space that feels intimate yet expansive.
Their debut album, Comfort In The Knowing, was shaped over five formative years. Its origins trace back to 2020, when Dublin fell quiet and the pace of life slowed. During lockdown, the pair began meeting in Phoenix Park with guitars, notebooks and fragments of melody. What began as an escape from isolation became the foundation of a record built on patience, reflection and persistence.
Those early sessions were about presence rather than productivity. Long runs through the park turned into conversations about sound, lyrics and direction. The landscape became a backdrop for clarity, and PHOENO took its name from the place that sparked it all.
As restrictions eased, the songs moved with them into a cold industrial unit in Dublin 15. With minimal equipment and long nights after work, Matthews and Corbett refined their ideas piece by piece. By day, Corbett works in corporate advertising and Matthews in film casting at LKC. By night, they stepped outside those commercial structures into something more personal and unguarded.
Across five years they wrote, scrapped and rewrote, allowing the album to evolve alongside them. The result is a collection of deliberate, emotionally direct songs built from layered guitars and subtle electronic textures. There is a quiet tension throughout, balancing ambition and stillness, certainty and doubt, city life and solitude.
Comfort In The Knowing stands as a time capsule of a changing Dublin and two collaborators coming fully into their own. What began in silence now moves with purpose.