About the Journey
Most of us are familiar with the feeling. On the surface everything seems fine and dandy, but below the facade something is wrong. Terribly wrong. This was the exact situation Niel Irson was in when he left his native Denmark behind and headed to Portugal in 2011. Not only was his long-term romantic relationship slowly coming apart, but there was something about his life situation that just wasn’t right. He had a sweet, beautiful girlfriend, an admirable job as a self-made game designer, and seemed on the path to the good life. But at some point he’d lost track of himself. So, off to Portugal he went to start over on a new, inspired chapter of his life.

On the brink of the Atlantic in tiny, charming, bankruptcy-threatened Portugal, songs suddenly started to pour from him. He settled his accounts, quit the all-consuming dream job and started from scratch. Withdrew his pension funds and spent them on studio equipment, which he snuck past airport security as hand luggage weighing in at around 25 kgs. And in May 2011 he started recording what would one day become “The Sweet Joy of Hunting Someone Down” - a dusty, DIY indie-folk travelogue album from the borderlands of love.

About the Album
From the sunny southern coast of Portugal to the cold Danish shores Niel Irson has recorded a travelogue of sound. A dogma-style album with guitar and song always recorded in one take. And while some songs grew into more complex pieces, they have all been written and recorded on the dusty roads and in small spaces around Europe. The best ones have been condensed into the intensely personal album “The Sweet Joy of Hunting Someone Down” - a strong debut which demonstrates not only his ability to write an array of intriguing, modern songs, but also his talent for infectious melodies and personal, poetic lyrics that are sung from the heart.

On “The Sweet Joy of Hunting Someone Down” Niel Irson combines folk, indie pop and folk punk and defines his own artistic space in between the Ryan Adams’ songwriting, the vulnerability of Damien Rice’s “O” and a tinge of something that smells like Soundgarden grunge. It’s an intensely profound album that invites you to travel along from the puffy, pink clouds of a love in its infancy to the deep vale of despair of said love lost, and all the way to the brink of insanity.

About Niel Irson
More than anything, Niel is a songwriter. Oh, and he’s got a voice. A special kind of voice. He goes it solo as a travelling troubadour, adventurer and romantic. With his feet on the ground, his head in the clouds and his hands holding onto his lonesome companion; an acoustic guitar.