Pilgrims bring their musical journey to Kilkenny this weekend

Pilgrims, the new collaboration between founding members of Bell X1 Paul Noonan and Brian Crosby, comes to Kilkenny this weekend.

Two musicians whose creative relationship stretches back to their teenage years, Noonan and Crosby first formed Juniper (with Damien Rice) before becoming founding members of Irish indie band Bell X1. In the years since, both have developed singular careers: Noonan through Bell X1 and other projects Printer Clips and HousePlants (with electronic producer Daithí), and Crosby via acclaimed film and television scores and his solo piano and ambient work. Their debut album Wintering is out now, 30 January 2026, marking their first full project together in 16 years.

Written across 2024 and 2025 and recorded at Crosby’s Treehouse Studios in County Wicklow, Wintering is a restrained, piano-led record, centred on voice, space, and atmosphere. Many of the songs began as instrumental pieces by Crosby or lyrical sketches by Noonan. The project took its name and form while the pair were performing early versions of the songs in small rooms last spring, just piano and voice, testing how the material landed in front of a live audience. That live setting proved decisive.

“Since reconnecting on My Bones a Scaffold last year, we’ve been working on a bunch of songs that sprung from new instrumental pieces by Brian, or songs that I had sketches for,” said Noonan. “Colouring them in together. Coming from a more classical or cinematic well, Brian takes the kinds of harmonic journeys that I just don’t, and the songs are all the richer for it.

“We did some shows together last April and played some of these new things. It was there that Pilgrims was formed, in its purist form just piano and vocal. Not torch songs as such, but somewhat similar in their yearning, theatrical sentimentality.

“In those small, beautiful rooms, it took actually playing the songs for people, feeling that connection and inhabiting the characters for it to feel like it had its own heart and lungs.

“The recordings are a little more embellished, though often we would add things and take them away - feeling that we knew what this thing isn’t, happy to be a little fuzzy on what it is.”

Currently touring Wintering across Ireland in intimate venues with pianos, the duo are performing songs from Wintering, alongside selected material from the early Bell X1 catalogue. See them live in the Watergate Theatre this Sunday. Tickets are available here