Productive year for Acko releasing single each month of the year

“I HAD a very good reason for deciding late last year to release a single every month in 2025,” explains Tallaght-born singer-songwriter Acko Atkinson.

It has been a “very interesting and productive” year for him, as he has released a new single each month this year.

“Working to a deadline can be very rewarding and also a little bit frightening.” At the start of the year, he states he “thought I knew” what the first five singles would be.

As it turned out, the song he had earmarked for April still has not come out.

He decided early on to revive and finish some old songs like ‘Motorway Song’ and ‘The Heart That Cries Wolf’.

He had some new songs he wanted to put out, like ‘No Short Cuts’ and ‘Chocolate Full of Lies’.

Acko wrote many songs this year, so a couple of them ended up coming out: ‘Headmelter’ and ‘Your Bus Isn’t Coming.’

Then there were the B sides; “I had so much fun with them.” These consisted of a couple of remixes, a few new songs and “all the messing around with AI”.

Acko would like to thank all the people who helped him over the year; his daughter Veda and Lynda Murphy did the backing vocals on ‘Chocolate Full of Lies’.

Keith Ericksen played piano and Gary Dugan did the strings on ‘The Heart That Cries Wolf’.  Acko’s old Grasshopper bandmate Brian K Adams added some “amazing” guitar to ‘Motorway Song’.

A “special mention” goes to Noel Quaid and Iain King, who played bass and guitar, respectively, on most of these songs.

This album compiles all the singles from 2025 plus four extra tracks.

‘Draw The Line’ is about late nights and bad decisions; “it was until recently going to be on the album I’m releasing next year but then I wrote a song that fit better.”

‘Here Comes My Brother’ was written over 20 years ago about an old friend re-entering Acko’s life.

‘Stormcrows’ is named after a band Acko was in in the 1980s; ‘it’s a little bit of tongue-in-cheek thrash”.

‘A Different Season’ is a new song; this is the second version of it Acko has recorded after abandoning the original.

It was going to be an acoustic song, but “as usual the electric guitar came out, and this is the result.”

Acko concludes by commenting that he thinks he is “going to enjoy not having a deadline for a while.” He has an album “mostly” ready to go and a “few other” ideas for 2026.

‘Twenty Four Plus Four’ has been available to listen to on Bandcamp and the usual streaming platforms since December 12.

Watch this space for more to come from Acko in 2026.