Crying It Out With the Ancestors: How Old Irish Laments Became Gen Z's Most Honest Playlist

Scroll TikTok at 2 a.m. on any given Tuesday and you'll find something you probably didn't expect: a 21-year-old in a Columbus, Ohio dorm room, tears streaming down her face, singing a centuries-old Irish lament into her phone camera. The caption reads, "I don't even know what half the words mean but I haven't cried this hard in months." It has 400,000 likes.

Welcome to one of the internet's strangest and most quietly beautiful corners — a space where traditional Irish grief music is becoming the emotional vocabulary that modern pop somehow forgot to write.

What Even Is a Sean-Nós Lament?

Before we get into the algorithm, let's back up. Sean-nós — pronounced "shan-nohss" and meaning "old style" in Irish — is one of the oldest surviving vocal traditions in Europe. It's unaccompanied, deeply ornamented, and built around the kind of raw, unpolished delivery that feels almost confrontationally intimate. There's no autotune buffer. No reverb to hide behind. Just a human voice sitting in a room with its own heartbreak.

Laments, or caoineadh ("keening"), formed a specific branch of this tradition — songs sung at wakes, over coffins, after famines, after emigrations that everyone understood might as well be deaths. These weren't songs about loss in the abstract. They were loss, bottled in melody and passed down like heirlooms nobody wanted but everybody kept.

And somehow, in 2024, they're landing with people who've never set foot in County Kerry.

The Algorithm Didn't Plan This

Madeline Torres, a 23-year-old music therapy student in Portland, Oregon, stumbled onto sean-nós singing after a breakup sent her deep into YouTube rabbit holes. "I was looking for something that matched how I actually felt," she says. "Not sad in a cute, relatable way — genuinely gutted. And somehow I ended up watching this woman in Connemara sing a song about a son who drowned, and I just... I felt seen in a way that a sad pop song hadn't managed in years."

Madeline started posting her own attempts at Irish ballads — not sean-nós, but the more accessible emigrant laments like The Parting Glass and She Moved Through the Fair — and her following grew faster than she expected. "People kept commenting things like, 'Why does this hurt more than anything on Spotify?' And honestly? I think it's because it's not trying to comfort you. It's just telling the truth."

This is the thing that musicologists have been noticing too. Dr. Patricia Hannigan, a specialist in Celtic vocal traditions who teaches at a music conservatory in Boston, points out that the emotional directness of Irish mourning songs sits completely outside the grammar of contemporary pop. "Modern sad songs tend to resolve," she explains. "There's a hook, a key change, a moment of catharsis or empowerment. Irish laments don't do that. They just grieve. And for a generation dealing with climate anxiety, economic precarity, and social isolation, that refusal to tie things up neatly might actually feel more honest."

Migration, Grief, and the American Gut Punch

There's also something specifically resonant about the content of these songs for American listeners — particularly those with Irish heritage, but not exclusively.

A huge proportion of traditional Irish laments are about leaving. About watching the coastline disappear. About writing letters that take months to arrive and sometimes never do. About building a life somewhere new while carrying the weight of everything you left behind. For the children and grandchildren of immigrants — not just Irish ones — that emotional landscape is encoded somewhere deep.

"I'm Puerto Rican and Irish on my mom's side," says Marcus Delgado, a 26-year-old content creator based in Chicago who runs a small but devoted account dedicated to what he calls "ancestral sadness music." "When I sing Danny Boy or something heavier like The Lament of the Three Marys, I'm not just connecting to Irish grief. I'm connecting to every version of my family that had to leave somewhere and never fully arrived somewhere else. That's a universal American story."

Marcus's point cuts to something important. The Irish emigrant experience is, in many ways, the ur-text of American immigrant grief — the template for a kind of loss that doesn't have a clean name but lives in family kitchens and Sunday phone calls and the way certain songs can make your grandmother cry before she even gets to the second verse.

TikTok as the New Kitchen Session

In traditional Irish music culture, the kitchen session — an informal gathering where songs get passed around a table with no stage, no audience, just participants — is considered the most authentic form of transmission. What's happening on TikTok, in a weird, pixelated, parasocial way, is something that rhymes with that.

Creators aren't performing these songs. They're sharing them the way you'd share something that helped you survive a bad week. The comments sections on these videos read less like fan engagement and more like group therapy — people tagging friends who lost someone, people explaining that they played a song at their dad's funeral, people from Japan and Brazil and Nigeria saying they don't understand the words but they understand the feeling.

"There's no irony in how people are engaging with this music," says Dr. Hannigan. "And that's remarkable in an online culture that defaults to irony as a defense mechanism. These songs are stripping that away."

The Grief We're Not Allowed to Have

If you ask the listeners themselves why this music hits so hard right now, the answers cluster around a single theme: permission.

Gen Z, by most accounts, is navigating a grief landscape that doesn't have adequate cultural infrastructure. Pandemic losses that were never properly mourned. A mental health crisis that's been acknowledged but not resolved. A generational sense of mourning for futures that feel less certain than they did for parents and grandparents. And a broader pop culture that, despite its best intentions, tends to rush toward healing before sitting in the wound.

Irish laments don't rush. They stay. They were built by people who understood that grief is not a problem to be solved but a presence to be accompanied.

"I think young people are hungry for music that gives them permission to not be okay yet," says Madeline Torres. "These songs are like — it's okay to stay here a little longer. It's okay to feel all of this."

And maybe that's the most Irish thing about any of this: the understanding that sometimes the most comforting thing in the world is a song that doesn't pretend the hard parts aren't hard.

Sin é. That's it, exactly.