Ellie O’Neill is back at it again, providing us another celestially enchanting folk track, “Anna with the Silver Arrow”
I was first pulled into Irish indie-folk singer, Ellie O’Neill’s orbit, through her second single “Little Sister”, released in December 2025, which I quickly became obsessed with. Built around a melodic, looping guitar line, the song is carried by haunting vocals that toy with ideas of grief, love and growth.
“Anna with the Silver Arrow” follows that same pattern of emotional depth in mesmerising lyrics, all wound-up in a traditional folk balladry. Elegant and heartfelt, Ellie’s clean cut vocals slice through the acoustic guitars, giving us centre stage to her epic, lyrical fable.
“Anna with the Silver Arrow” feels like a classic love song, filled to the brim with an enamoured outpour. Grounded, expressive lyricism balances tenderness with raw edged emotion and an expansive creative vocabulary.
True to its folk roots, these lyrics are usually entangled in thick vines of natural imagery: she talks of a swarm, a tide, a person that is so immense a presence that they can bring an ocean to her blue moods. This creative lyrical spine is a common theme in Ellie’s music as she carries her emotional messaging both powerfully and poetically.
What really makes my heart swell when I listen to Ellie O’Neill’s music is the organic inevitability of her identity and experiences as a queer woman, fully present in her song-writing. Where women loving women (WLW) narratives are often flattened or softened into a hazy vagueness, O’Neill allows queerness to bloom fully, to sit, to thrive, to ache, to scream in such depth, as a natural and inseparable part of herself.
Folk music, one of the oldest storytelling traditions across cultures, has long been a space for emotional truth and personal expression. There’s a lot of language around queer as modern and I think Ellie O’Neill’s sound brings me back to an ancient queer understanding of love that is timeless and natural, so unique and yet universal.
For me, listening to this song that ties together queerness, nature and traditional sound is the fondest of music to my ears, so personal and so heartfelt.
This growing collection of songs, most recently expanded with “Anna with the Silver Arrow”, have come to feel quite close. While this connection may be personal for me, I hope that everyone can find this deep attachment in music, and you never know, Ellie O’Neill’s catalogue of songs may become for you what they have for me.
Stream “Anna with the Silver Arrow” below:
