Ireland has produced many great songwriters, says Nick Kelly, and the latest is Ken Sweeney, aka Brian.

The year's first truly I great album is upon us. And it's by a band called Brian. A seamless collection of poignant, arresting songs. Bring Trouble traces the steps from the giddy delirium of love's first flourish to the heartbreak of betrayal and disillusionment, before arriving at an eventual reaffirmation of life and love.

The author of this song Cycle is Ken Sweeney, a London based Dubliner in his early thirties, who is Brian's heart and soul. He coaxed respected musicians to play on the album, including members of the High Llamas and the Cocteau Twins, while some of the Divine Comedy will feature in his touring band.

"It's all about my own memories of growing up in Dublin and falling in love," he explains. "If you look at a writer like Carson McCullers or filmmakers like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, they each have this recurring theme throughout their work that in relationships and in love people transcend their own lives. That's pretty much what a song like Wherever We're Going is all about. That contact, that shared experience with other people is where the greatest wealth lies." There are several potential hit singles on the album, a case in point being the effervescent This Kitchen, Sam. "I was staying in a friend's house in Termonfeckin where I wrote a lot of these songs. It was early in the morning and I was thinking just how weird the inside of a kitchen looks at that time. So you get these lines about the hardened sugar on a sugar bowl, the humming of the fridge, the blackened dirt on the cooker."

It so happens that the aforementioned friend is one of the writers of the cult sitcom, Father Ted. Indeed, Sweeney himself had a cameo in the final episode, appearing in full clerical garb alongside a certain Father Brian Eno. "Getting to act opposite Eno was a high point. Between takes we talked about music and I owned up to being a musician. He asked me what my band was called. When I said Brian, his face lit up. He said: "That's the greatest compliment anybody has ever paid me". And I had to say: "Well, actually, it's not after you, Brian. It's named after the bass player in the Blades" — a revered Dublin band of the early 1980s. There and then I blew any chance of getting him to produce my album."

While retaining the warmth and lyrical depth of Brian's earlier work. Bring Trouble has a musical breadth that acknowledges the developments of the intervening years. "The early stuff was very emotive and heartfelt, maybe a little too earnest," says Sweeney. "I would like to make that kind of music just a little bit more accessible and build on it. I'm sorry for the people who were expecting jingly jangly guitars on the new album. I got bored with that and I want to try something different."

Bring Trouble is released on Monday by Setanta Records. Brian play Upstairs at the Garage, London, on April 22