Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy returns to Las Vegas

At times, his voice booms like a firecracker detonated in a confined space, its reverberations felt as much as heard.

At others, it’s a thing of tremulous understatement, flickering like candlelight when stirred.

There is a constant, though, when Dermot Kennedy sings: When he opens his throat, his heart tends to follow suit.

The ascendant singer-songwriter’s repertoire is anchored by the emotional equivalent of gravity’s pull, grounding everything in deeply felt sentiment as palpable as his Irish brogue.

“Don’t tell me this is all for nothing,” he practically howls over wisps of acoustic guitar at the outset of “Outnumbered,” perhaps his best-known song, before settling into a near-rap cadence over a fluttering hip-hop beat.

The first single from Kennedy’s full-length debut, “Without Fear,” “Outnumbered” has racked up nearly 120 million streams on Spotify, helping launch Kennedy to stardom in the United Kingdom, where “Fear” was the fastest-selling album of 2019 in his native Ireland.

Now Kennedy is building an increasingly bigger name for himself on these shores, graduating from clubs to larger concert halls on his current tour. The first time Kennedy played Las Vegas in November 2018, it was at the 650-capacity Vinyl at the Hard Rock Hotel. A little over a year later, he’s headlining The Pearl at the Palms, a 2,500-seater.

Hip-hop hybrid

Kennedy has distinguished himself by blending folk earthiness and unadorned emoting with the kind of digital production flourishes you might hear on a Future record.

“I think that’s something we try to balance a lot of the time,” the 28-year-old explains. “I wanted to take all those influences I’ve got, which could be as eclectic as David Gray and Drake or Bon Iver and Meek Mill. It really is like I’m drawing on both worlds, and so our challenge was to not make it be like, ‘Oh, it sounds like a different artist from track two to track three.’

“It feels fun to be doing something that’s hopefully unique instead of me kind of staying in my comfort zone of just writing acoustic singer-songwriter songs,” he adds. “It’s fun for me to mess around with the production.”

This manifests in a variety of ways, from the gospel-like fervor of “What Have I Done,” a torch song with flames fully stoked, to plaintive, delicately wrought acoustic ballad “The Corner,” where you can hear Kennedy’s fingertips sliding up and down the guitar strings before some dramatic, swelling synth lines send the song surging to its conclusion.

Thematically, Kennedy’s songs aren’t always naked confessional, but there’s a frequent undercurrent of vulnerability, an openness, in songs that often address the push-and-pull of love lost and gained.

He puts himself out there without putting himself out in the process.

“It’s something I’m just comfortable doing,” Kennedy explains. “If anything, it’s me ignoring any kind of process. A lot of people remark upon the fact that it’s quite vulnerable or it’s quite honest, and I think that I would start to hurt that if I keep thinking about it or try to do it on purpose. That’s who I am inherently, and so that’s just how it will be if I don’t think about it. And so I don’t have a problem exposing that part of myself to the world.”

A different kind of dream

Having played guitar since he was 11 years old, Kennedy started writing songs and performing them when he was 16.

He’d busk on the streets of Dublin and Boston for a time, though music wasn’t his first love.

“I was obsessed with playing soccer when I was younger,” he says. “It was my dream to go and play football professionally. But it also became quite clear at a young age that that wasn’t feasible, because I was good, but I was not that good. And so music kind of showed itself.”

Though he’s left soccer behind for a life in music, the former still informs the latter.

The playing field has changed, that’s all.

“When you were training and when you were playing a match, it was like meditation — 90 minutes, three times a week — where my whole mind would be clear and I would only think about that,” Kennedy says. “It was this really beautiful thing.

“It was something that I kind of longed for these days,” he continues, “and so I guess that’s what music became for me. One of the most important things I did when I played football was that I tried to seize that moment and cherish it as much as I could. I try to do that in music now.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.