M(h)aol’s Something Soft is an album with a misnomer at its core. Nothing here is soft—certainly not the guitars, which jangle rather than bounce; not the percussion that weirdly pulses throughout the songs; not the lyrics, which offer blunt truths. Certainly not the emotional architecture of the record, which is built around a simple, devastating premise: the female body is not safe, and the world refuses to make it so.
The band—an Irish post-punk trio rooted in Dublin, Belfast, and London that takes its name from a 16th-century Irish pirate queen—have always been explicit about naming the structures that imperil women. The lineup for Something Soft places Constance Keane at the centre as drummer, lyricist, and lead vocalist, with Jamie Hyland on bass and production duties, and Sean Nolan on guitar. Earlier contributors Sarah Deegan and Zoë Greenway also appear across the record, giving the album the unmistakable sense of a feminist collective even as the project has narrowed into a core trio.
That history matters: M(h)aol emerged from a loosely connected group of fiercely political musicians deeply invested in feminist punk, and Something Soft is their sharpest distillation of those commitments to date.
Almost every track on their sophomore record returns to its animating tension—sometimes plainly, sometimes allegorically, sometimes with a howl that rattles the edges of the mix. It’s a record about vigilance, boundary-keeping, hyper-awareness, and the exhausting labour of merely trying to exist in public. In this sense, Something Soft is one of the most pointed and fitting post-#MeToo albums yet released.
When the #MeToo movement surged globally in 2017, it wasn’t only about exposing monstrous acts of male violence. It was also about naming the continuum of aggression: microaggressions, dismissive jokes, subtle coercions, unwanted touching disguised as clumsy affection, digital entitlement, and the thousand small ways women are told to manage their own safety. It was a collective action—women testifying together, believing one another, amplifying one another, mapping patterns of harm that had long been individualised and ignored.
Something Soft translates that collective testimony into sound. But unlike other recent post-punk albums from Ireland and the UK (see Lambrini Girls, Sprints and Meryl Streek for excellent recent examples), M(h)aol points towards no path to escape. There is no focus on righteous anger. Instead, there is an overwhelming focus on identifying the dangers and harm of living in a misogynistic world. The album describes it and does not offer the fantasy of magical solutions.
The opening track wastes no time establishing the album’s central truth. Keane’s whispered lines about clutching keys, adjusting posture, or scanning a street for danger aren’t lyrical ornament—they’re documentary. Like a soundtrack from a slow-burning horror movie, the sparse instrumentation behind her creates a sonic portrait of a woman walking in fear. When the track erupts, with Nolan’s guitar a warning siren and Hyland’s bass stalking beneath it, the fear becomes communal, almost ritualistic. That is M(h) aol’s outstanding achievement: they refuse to present female fear as a private neurosis. They show it as a social fact.
What makes the album feel so urgent now is its awareness of the cultural regression since the height of #MeToo. For a brief period, corporations scrambled, media outlets were forced to go public with accusations, and social circles renegotiated what counted as acceptable behaviour, but the backlash was swift. In the Trump and post-Trump era, toxic masculinity has not just returned—it has been proudly embraced.
The swaggering cruelty, the performative indifference to women’s fear, the normalisation of misogynistic rhetoric: all of it forms the backdrop against which M(h)aol are writing. If #MeToo taught the world to look at male aggression with collective logic rather than instinctive disbelief, the last several years have reminded us how quickly that lesson can be undone. Something Soft becomes, in this context, not commentary but record-keeping.
In the past few months, the political landscape that Something Soft seems to anticipate has taken on an even sharper edge. In September 2025, Donald Trump, alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publicly suggested that acetaminophen use during pregnancy may be linked to autism, even though no scientific consensus supports such a claim. Kennedy then intensified the rhetoric in a Cabinet meeting, stating that women who take pain relievers while pregnant are acting “irresponsibly”, even as he conceded that definitive evidence is lacking. Medical organisations quickly responded, warning that discouraging a commonly recommended medication could jeopardise pregnant women’s health, especially when untreated fever or pain carries greater risks than properly dosed acetaminophen.
What stands out is not the scientific inaccuracy but the political logic. This framing redirects responsibility for developmental outcomes onto women’s choices, positioning ordinary self-care decisions as potential moral failings. At the same time that abortion access has been curtailed and reproductive autonomy eroded, the administration’s narrative further burdens women by suggesting that any deviation from an idealised model of maternal purity might harm their future children. In effect, women are told they are both less entitled to bodily autonomy and more culpable for any perceived threat to fetal well-being — a rhetorical bind that is as punitive as it is scientifically unfounded.
This moment exemplifies how, in the post-#MeToo era, accountability has been redirected. Rather than addressing systemic misogyny or the structures that enable male aggression, public discourse increasingly places scrutiny on women: their choices, their bodies, their perceived failures. Under this climate, where toxic masculinity has found new institutional expression, Something Soft reads not merely as a cultural critique but as a prescient warning. The album becomes a reminder that the political forces seeking to control women’s bodies are the same forces that absolve men of responsibility. It’s a continuation, rather than a reversal, of the dynamics that #MeToo sought to expose.
The record is especially sharp in its depiction of microaggressions. On songs inspired by the harassment women face in their DMs—situations where men demand emotional labour, attention, or access—the band literalises discomfort through their arrangements. Guitars sound irritated; basslines are repetitive; drums never settle. The sonic unease mirrors the emotional reality: the threat may not always be physical, but it is persistent and rooted in entitlement. This understanding of harassment as a continuum, not an event, aligns closely with the insights of #MeToo. M(h)aol simply turn up the volume.
Then there is the voice. Keane’s vocal performance is extraordinary. She shifts registers with dramatic purpose: murmuring through fear, talk-singing through indictment, straining through memory, exploding through rage. Her voice works in tandem with her drumming, giving many songs a rhythmic urgency that feels less like singing and more like exhalation, like a breath forced out under pressure. Importantly, the vocal stylisations never feel forced, a testament to how tight the whole band is together.
It is one of the dramatic differences between Something Soft and their first album, Attachment Styles (2023); Keane’s voice is one instrument woven among all the others. There are moments when the band thins out the instrumentation, giving her bare voice room to tremble; there are others when they surround her in distortion, transforming vulnerability into fury. Across the album, her voice refuses softness. In fact, in the last song on the record, “Coda”, it is a scream that is its centrepiece.
Which brings us back to the title. Something Soft reads, in retrospect, as an indictment—softness is what women are asked to be. Softness is how patriarchy justifies violence. Softness is the illusion that compliance, politeness, or shrinking oneself might guarantee safety. M(h)aol rejects that lie completely. There is one song, though, that shows the unwanted absence of softness. It is a song about the death of her 13-year-old dog.
The focus of “I Miss My Dog” is on the missing sound, the smell, and the feel of a beloved animal. But what has stayed with me is Keane’s repeated statement that is straightforward in its telling, “You should be here.” Her dog is gone, and it doesn’t make sense. Dealing with the grief of recently losing my dog, Finn, there is the absolute truth that she reveals—dogs shouldn’t die, they should always be here receiving belly scratches, treats, and kisses. Perhaps the dog is the soft thing in the album’s title, and the absence reveals how hard the world really is. Without softness, there is only the truth: fears named, structures exposed, and rage voiced.
In the end, Something Soft is a powerful feminist punk album—not because it is timely, though it certainly is, but because it is honest. It is a record crafted by musicians who understand the stakes of inhabiting the female body in a world where safety is conditional and fleeting. It’s propelled by Keane’s voice, capable of holding terror, grief, anger, and defiance in the same breath.