Irish vocalist, composer and songwriter Christine Tobin is taking on one of the defining anxieties of modern life with Pseudologia Fantastica, a striking, genre-defyingwork that explores disinformation, political extremism and the increasingly blurred boundary between truth and fiction. Released on 2 October 2026,the project finds an acclaimed artist using music, spoken word and experimental sound to examine a world struggling to agree on what is real.
Rather than sticking to the familiar conventions of a jazz album, Tobin has created something considerably more ambitious: a multimedia musical journey that combines her distinctive vocal approach with electronic textures, instrumental improvisation and pointed social commentary. The result is a project that aims not merely to entertain, but to make listeners stop, think and perhaps question the noise surrounding them.
When the truth becomes part of the performance
The title Pseudologia Fantastica refers to pathological or compulsive lying, an idea that provides the conceptual foundation for Tobin's examination of contemporary information culture. Her concern is with more than individual dishonesty: the work considers what happens when misinformation becomes commonplace, language loses its reliability and technology can be used to manipulate public perception.
The project originated through the Improvised Music Company's BAN BAM commission and development award, and premiered at Dublin's The Complex on 3 April 2025 as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Its subsequent development into a released album brings that experimental performance into a form that listeners can revisit and explore at their own pace.
Tobin's approach is particularly compelling because she does not treat the subject as a conventional political lecture set to music. Instead, the different artistic elements become part of the argument itself: spoken passages, shifting soundscapes and contrasting musical moods reflect a culture in which competing voices continually battle for attention.
A sound that reuses to sit still
The album's musical palette is as varied as its subject matter. Tobin brings together jazz, spoken-word performance, layered vocals, electronics, hand percussion and improvised passages, with cellist Kate Shortt and guitarist Phil Robson providing important instrumental counterpoints. Robson also produced the recording.
One of the album's most intriguing features is its four-part structure, which gives the work a dramatic arc rather than the feel of a conventional collection of unrelated songs. The opening section moves through uneasy, searching material before reaching the more hymn-like Grace. The title track then arrives with a markedly different energy, using voice and cello in a theatrical, almost circus-like parody of the grandstanding liar.
From there, the music turns increasingly rhythmic, disruptive and satirical. Tracks including Astroturfing, The Noise and March address the mechanics of contemporary propaganda and the atmosphere of perpetual confrontation, while Patriarchy and Women turn attention towards women's rights and the structures of power. The closing pieces, Resistance and Healing Water, offer a more hopeful conclusion, placing solidarity, compassion and collective action at the heart of the record's message.
It is a bold progression, moving from confusion and disorientation towards the possibility of renewal. Crucially, Tobin's use of different musical forms makes that journey feel expressive rather than simply explanatory.
An arTist with a distinctive musical history
For listeners familiar with Tobin's earlier work, this new direction builds on a career defined by an adventurous relationship with jazz and literature. Born and raised in Dublin, she studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London before becoming a prominent figure in the London and New York creative music scenes. She returned to Ireland in 2020.
Her previous projects have explored poetry and song in equally individual ways. Sailing to Byzantium, her settings of W. B. Yeats poems, won a British Composer Award in 2012, while her interpretations of Leonard Cohen's songs earned her a Herald Angel Award in 2013. She was named Jazz Vocalist of the Year at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards in 2014, following a BBC Jazz Award for Best Vocalist in 2008.
That background helps explain why Pseudologia Fantastica feels like an evolution rather than a sudden departure. Tobin has long been interested in the relationship between words, music and emotional meaning. Here, she applies that curiosity to a particularly urgent contemporary subject.
Frm disinformation to resistance
What makes Pseudologia Fantastica stand out is its refusal to leave the listener in a state of despair. Although its themes include deception, misogyny, far-right ideologies and the misuse of technology, its final movement points towards resistance and the possibility of a more humane society.
That sense of purpose is central to Tobin's own description of the project. She has framed the work as a response to the forces dividing communities, while acknowledging the people challenging inequality and campaigning for social justice.
Ultimately, Pseudologia Fantastica asks a difficult question: when the world is saturated with competing narratives, how do we recover a shared sense of truth? Christine Tobin's answer is not a simple solution, but a challenging, richly textured work that makes room for doubt, dissent and, finally, hope.