Maz O’Connor is returning to her roots with her fifth album, “Love It Is a Killing Thing”, to be released on 13th March 2026. “Love It Is A Killing Thing” is O’Connor’s first album in four years: she took time out from recording and performing to have her first child, and to work on her musical, “The Wife of Michael Cleary”, which won the Stiles + Drewe Prize 2023 and is now in development with West End producers.
During this break, O’Connor found herself drawn to the folk songs she grew up with and realised that she had never made a full album of traditional material. “Having a child connected me with my deepest, oldest self,” she says, “and musically, for me, that’s traditional folk song. Where my musical journey began.”
Now based in London, O’Connor returned to her native Cumbria for a month to conceive the album, drawing from songs and fragments collected in “When Cecil Sharp Left the Mountain”, which had travelled from the UK and Ireland to Appalachia and back again.
“What I love about these versions,” she says, “is that they’ve been smoothed down, like pebbles held by a thousand hands, until their edges have worn away and only the best lyrics remain. Their poetry has been distilled over the centuries to leave the purest, most universal expressions of heartache behind.”
In April 2025, O’Connor spent a week in a cottage in the woods in Kent with collaborators Zak Hobbs (The Thompsons, Rufus Wainwright) and Anna Rheingans (The Rheingans Sisters), arranging her material. Inspired by Tia Blake and other artists of the 1960s-70s folk revival, she wanted to keep things simple and live.
The album was recorded at Yellow Arch Studios, Sheffield, with Thomas Dibb and Mark Lewis engineering. The sessions were recorded entirely live to tape — no edits, no overdubs — capturing the immediacy and intimacy of the performances.
O’Connor will be playing a series of dates supporting Jim Moray and will shortly be announcing headline shows. Details can be found here.
O’Connor has released the first single from “Love It Is A Killing Thing”. The recording is a dark reimagining of ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’, with a new melody by O’Connor.
