Northern Irish singer/songwriter Joshua Burnside strips his sound to its barest elements on ‘It’s Not Going to Be Okay,’ a raw and unflinching album written in the aftermath of personal loss that confronts grief without illusion or resolution. Blending intimate acoustic arrangements with heartrending lyrical detail, the record captures the contradictions of mourning – memory and absence, lightness and despair – offering a deeply human portrait of life itself that finds meaning in the act of carrying on.

Stream: “Something Else” – Joshua Burnside

After the storm the sea is gentle / Even the longest night must end…

* * *

Grief is a shape-shifter – elusive, disorienting, and impossible to hold in one place for long.

It doesn’t move in straight lines; it loops, fractures, drifts between memory and disbelief, between the moments you can hold and the ones that slip clean through your hands. On It’s Not Going to Be Okay, Northern Irish singer/songwriter Joshua Burnside traces that unstable terrain with a rare clarity, writing in the immediate aftermath of losing one of his closest friends and refusing to soften, lighten, or smooth over the experience. His songs don’t reach for resolution or reassurance; they sit inside the disorientation, capturing the strange, brutal reality of loss as it unfolds in real time. The result is a deeply heartrending, human record that turns grief into motion – not a destination to arrive at, but a process you learn to move through, moment by moment. On It’s Not Going to Be Okay, Joshua Burnside delivers his most stripped-back and unguarded work yet – a raw, unflinching portrait of grief, memory, and survival that finds meaning not in conclusions, but in the act of continuing.

It's Not Going to be Okay - Joshua Burnside — It’s Not Going to be Okay – Joshua Burnside

After the storm the sea is gentle
Even the longest night must end
After the war a peace is brokered
I know I’ll see you soon my friend

We’re gonna get through this together
You and me, you will see
Nothing will keep us down
Keep us apart forever
You and me, you will see
Take my hand, nothing can
Keep us from loving each other
You and me, you will see
Nothing will keep us down

– “You and Me,” Joshua Burnside

Released February 20, 2026 via Nettwerk Music Group, It’s Not Going to Be Okay aches inside and out as Burnside reckons through some of life’s most bitter pills – taking us with him on a poignant folk-laden journey through death, loss, and what any of this world really means. His sixth studio album finds Burnside stripping his sound back to its barest elements, trading the dense, genre-blurring arrangements of his earlier work for a more direct and immediate approach where every word, every melody, and every silence carries weight.

It’s a stark and deeply introspective turning point for Burnside, and a striking contrast to 2025’s acclaimed Teeth of Time, a sweeping and sonically expansive record that wove together themes of new fatherhood, anxiety, political tension, and the fragile balance between personal joy and global unrest through richly layered, genre-blurring arrangements. A Belfast-based experimental folk artist known for weaving together Irish trad, alternative electronica, and found sounds into richly layered compositions, Burnside has steadily carved out a singular space within contemporary folk – one rooted in curiosity, tension, and emotional precision.

From his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Ephrata through the expansive, politically attuned Into the Depths of Hell and beyond, his music has consistently pushed against form and expectation; here, that same instinct manifests not through expansion, but through reduction, allowing the songs themselves to stand naked, unvarnished, and fully exposed.

**At its core, It’s Not Going to Be Okay is shaped by a profound personal loss that informs every note, every word, and every feeling it carries.**

“I started writing the record shortly after the death of one of my best friends,” Burnside tells Atwood Magazine. “Most of the album deals with that loss. And although the subject matter is very heavy, musically it is possibly my most upbeat record.”

As he explains, there’s no grand concept or imposed structure guiding these songs – just a willingness to follow each thought as it surfaced, letting lived experience shape the record from the inside out. “I didn’t really have a vision as such, I was just writing songs about everything that was going on inside my head, and after a few months I had these songs that all kind of worked together,” Burnside recalls. “I did know from very early on that this album was going to be sonically quite sparse compared to previous work, and that I wanted the songs and the production to be more straightforward in a way.”

That clarity and intention extends to the album’s title, a phrase that reads less like a warning and more like an honest admission of reality. “The title comes from the third track on the album, which deals with the inevitability of pain and suffering I guess,” Burnside says. “When you are in the midst of grief or any sort of misery, it seems silly to pretend like it’s all going to be okay. Which is kind of what we have to do every day.” Rather than offering comfort, It’s Not Going to Be Okay confronts the invisible, everyday performance of holding it together – and in doing so, finds its own form of truth.

That same balance of starkness and specificity carries into Burnside’s songwriting, where the smallest details often land with the greatest force. “I guess I was pleased with the line ‘the last armchair you ever sat on, before you overdosed, is the one I sit in every morning, to eat my egg and toast,’” he says, with a hint of wry self-awareness. “Haven’t heard anyone else use that rhyme before so yeah. It’s a bit ridiculous.” It’s a line that captures the record’s emotional core in miniature – the way grief embeds itself into the ordinary, reshaping even the most mundane rituals into something heavy, inescapable, and deeply personal.

Sitting on the step with a cup of tea
Seagulls wailing above the sea
We are one and we are three
Well, how strange it is this life

Lemons on the old wallpaper
Scraping old blood off the radiator
If I don’t see you soon
I’ll see you later
Or I won’t see you at all

That emotional honesty doesn’t just define the album in theory – it takes shape most vividly in the songs themselves, where Burnside lets each moment unfold with unfiltered clarity and weight.

If the album’s opening stretch establishes its emotional ground, it does so with a striking sense of contrast – light and darkness held side by side, neither canceling the other out. “You and Me” begins with just Burnside and his guitar at the fore, its delicate arrangement slowly blooming with visceral violin that cuts through like a sudden shaft of light. It’s tender and bittersweet, a fragile promise of togetherness that feels all the more poignant in hindsight – a song written before loss, now reframed by everything that follows. That warmth carries into “With You,” where memory becomes movement: “We used to lie under the turbines in the dark / Play tennis in the rain…” The track swells with lived-in detail and affection, its melody bright and buoyant even as it circles absence, capturing the strange, disarming way grief can sit alongside joy.

By the time the title track arrives, that tension erupts into a far more confrontational force. “It’s Not Going to Be Okay” abandons subtlety for sheer emotional heat, with Burnside channeling anger, confusion, and despair into a relentless, unflinching release. Lines like “I am all of your greatest nightmares come true” don’t just describe pain – they embody it, turning abstract fears into immediate and unavoidable expressions of feeling. It’s raw, real, and deeply cathartic, a moment where everything that’s been building finally breaks the surface, and in doing so, gives the record its clearest statement of purpose.

I am all of your
Greatest nightmares come true
Everything wrong with the world
And everything wrong with you
I am the oil spill
The drone strike on the hospital
The ugly truth and the bitter pill
It’s not gonna be okay

I am the tumour in your lung
I am the tooth that bites the tongue
I am the hip that needs replaced
And the heating bills you have missed

Elsewhere, Burnside leans into that same push and pull between the ordinary and the overwhelming, allowing moments of observation to carry immense emotional weight. “Nicer Part of Town” unfolds like a wandering daydream, its imagery flickering between the domestic and the surreal – “Sitting on the step with a cup of tea / Seagulls wailing above the sea…” – before spiraling outward. There’s a looseness to the way the song moves, thoughts drifting in and out without warning, mirroring the way memory itself behaves in the wake of loss.

That same intimacy sharpens on “The Last Armchair,” where Burnside distills grief into a single, unforgettable image. “I guess I was pleased with the line ‘the last armchair you ever sat on, before you overdosed, is the one I sit in every morning, to eat my egg and toast,’” he says. “Haven’t heard anyone else use that rhyme before so yeah. It’s a bit ridiculous.” The line lands with devastating force precisely because of its mundanity – the way it collapses past and present into one shared, inescapable space, where even the smallest routines are haunted by absence.

Oh, the last armchair you ever sat on
Before you overdosed
Is the one I sit in every morning
To eat my egg and toast

It was the first piece of furniture
That I think I ever bought
I felt so grown up when I carried it
Across the IKEA car park

Now I feel just like a child
I feel just like a child
Lost and alone in the homeware aisle
Oh, we’re all just playing house
Firemen and nurses
Waiting for someone to pick us and say
Ah you’re okay…

That search for meaning – or the illusion of it – continues through “Something Else” and “Moon High,” where Burnside grapples with the limits of understanding itself. The former reaches outward, chasing belief in the face of loss, its refrain circling the desire for anything beyond the finality of death: “Now that you’re dead / I want to believe in something else…” It’s restless and searching, caught between skepticism and longing. “Moon High,” by contrast, retreats inward, capturing the numbing self-preservation that can follow overwhelming grief – the denial, the forced detachment, the illusion of being able to carry on untouched. And yet, even that distance proves temporary, eventually giving way to the emotional release that’s been building beneath the surface. By the time Burnside reaches “Remake,” the album exhales into a more reflective and open-ended mood, imagining time not as a straight line but as a looping, shifting cycle – a closing thought that doesn’t resolve the record’s questions so much as reframe them, leaving us to sit with the possibility that understanding, like grief itself, is never fixed.

Burnside’s own favorite, “Good Times are Comin’,” leans all the way into that contradiction, embracing a disorienting duality that feels both playful and deeply uneasy. “This is one of the strangest songs I have ever written,” he admits. “It’s probably one of my weirdest and darkest songs, but the music is so bouncy and silly. It might be one of the happiest sounding songs about drug and alcohol abuse. I had a lot of help with the production of this one by Jamie Bishop, AKA Muckno, who played almost everything on it besides the guitar.” He’s not kidding – the track is weird in the best way, bright and brooding at once, with sprightly acoustic guitars and hazy synth drones trading space and pulling different emotions to the surface in real time. Lyrics like “Are ye having a good time? / Will you stay with me all night?” carry a restless, almost desperate energy, the repeated refrains teetering between celebration and collapse. It’s catchy, chaotic, and utterly devastating, capturing the fragile edge between escape and unraveling with a sharp, knowing clarity.

<a href="https://joshuaburnside.bandcamp.com/album/its-not-going-to-be-okay">It’s Not Going to be Okay by Joshua Burnside</a>

That tension – between brightness and despair, humor and heaviness, release and reckoning – is where It’s Not Going to Be Okay finds its truest voice. Burnside allows these songs to carry contradiction without trying to resolve it: Grief sits alongside fond memory, childhood wonder collides with adult responsibility, and moments of levity cut through even the most painful reflections. From the quiet intimacy of a home-recorded demo to the surreal pull of a past we can never relive or return to, from late-night restlessness to the stinging clarity of loss, this album holds space for the full spectrum of experience without forcing it into a single emotional lane.

And maybe that’s what makes It’s Not Going to be Okay feel so vital. Burnside’s honesty doesn’t just document grief; it opens a door into it, offering listeners a space where nothing has to be neatly explained or tied together. In sitting so fully inside his own emotions and experiences, he creates room for ours as well, allowing us to reflect on loss, memory, and even our own mortality without flinching away. There’s no false comfort here, no easy resolution – just the reassurance that feeling everything, all at once, is part of what it means to be alive.

“I hope people are able to get some catharsis from the record,” Burnside shares. “Writing the songs has definitely helped me.”

Well, I wrote the guestbook, or the death book
I love ye and left it at that
Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this now
Some old friends you hadn’t
Spoke to in ten years were bletherin’
So, I took my pint outside
where some kids were
Muckin’ around

And I thought of us then
And a cool wind blowin’
Through our hair
Watching the cargo ships pass
With the sun in our eyes
And our backs to the grass

And I thought of something you said once
Wondering round the woods off our heads
It’s all just a remake, nothing new
Maybe next time you’ll play me
And I can play you, and I can play you

– “Remake,” Joshua Burnside

This truly is Joshua Burnside at his finest hour.

In stripping everything back and leaning into his own rawest emotions, the singer/songwriter distills his voice to its most essential form, delivering a record that not only deepens his catalog but redefines what his music can hold moving forward.

In the end, It’s Not Going to Be Okay lingers not because it answers anything, but because it refuses to look away. Burnside meets grief head-on – not as a concept, but as a lived, daily presence that reshapes how we remember, how we move, and how we carry on. It remains elusive, ever-changing – a shape-shifting force that never settles into one fixed form.

Yet there’s a rare courage in that undiluted openness, and an even rarer generosity in the way he shares it, inviting listeners into a vulnerable world where nothing has to be resolved to be understood. If these songs offer any kind of solace, it’s not through reassurance, but through recognition – the understanding that even in life’s most disorienting moments, we are not alone in the experience of trying to make sense of it all.

Experience the full record via our below stream, and step inside Joshua Burnside’s It’s Not Going to be Okay with Atwood Magazine as he takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of his soul-stirring sixth studio album.

— —

:: stream/purchase It’s Not Going to be Okay here ::

:: connect with Joshua Burnside here ::

— —

‘It’s Not Going to be Okay’ – Joshua Burnside

:: Inside It’s Not Going to be Okay ::

— —

You and Me

This is a little love song I suppose. It’s the only song on the album that was written before my friend Dean died. This recording is actually the original demo that I recorded at home. I couldn’t replicate the intimacy of it in the studio.

With You

This is a song about friendship, love and death. Dean and I were friends since school, and in a band together with another pal. We played covers for fun – those were probably the happiest times of my teenage years. Being at a friend’s funeral is a surreal experience, and I had all kinds of surprising feelings and impulses. I wanted to run away, I wanted to scream, I wanted to climb into the grave and get buried as well. Aine Gordon lended her beautiful voice to the choruses in this one.