There is a particular kind of clarity that only surfaces when a body has nothing left to give, the kind found on the last night of a run of shows, in a stairwell or a car park, somewhere between one place and the next.

It was in exactly this kind of setting, a multi-story car park in Dublin, that Cork singer-songwriter Cathal Fitz wrote “A Rock and a Hard Place,” the new single from his debut EP, “Concise Waffle”.

Where exhaustion might have produced only complaint, Fitz instead found honesty, and the song that resulted carries the unmistakable charge of something written because there was no energy left to dress it up.

Fitz, born Cathal Fitzpatrick and raised in Togher, left a stable job in 2024 to commit to his craft, a decision that might read as a leap of faith were it not for how quickly the results followed.

Since his 2025 debut with “Firing Squad,” he has built a catalogue defined by candour rather than polish, drawing comparisons to Damien Rice and Tom Waits for his willingness to let discomfort sit inside a song rather than resolve it.

He has since shared stages with Darren Kiely, Skinny Living, Séamus Harty, Jack L and Jerry Fish, and supported Ryan Sheridan on dates in Germany, credentials that suggest an artist learning his craft in front of rooms, not in isolation.

“A Rock and a Hard Place” arrives as the second single from Concise Waffle, Fitz’s debut EP, due 4 September, following “Paper Planes” and preceding a run of UK and Ireland tour dates stretching from Manchester to Glasgow.

The EP’s broader concerns, fatherhood, sobriety, insecurity, and the effort connection takes, give this single its weight as a hinge point: a song less about a single failure than about the accumulated toll of gigging and performing without pause.

Within the current pop-folk climate in Ireland and the UK, where confessional songwriting increasingly competes with maximalist production, Fitz’s choice to foreground plainness over polish reads as a considered position rather than a limitation.

The recording insists on its own condition: captured live in a single take, with Emily O’Donoghue’s mandolin threading around Kealan Kenny’s violin, the arrangement never assumes a studio’s safety net.

Fitz’s vocal sits close to the microphone, cracking slightly at points a more produced version would likely smooth over, and that imperfection becomes the song’s argument.

The mandolin and violin do not decorate the vocal so much as hold it upright, offering a spare, string-led frame that lets the fatigue in his phrasing register as fact rather than performance.

It is a brave choice for a single meant to introduce a wider audience to his work, prioritising truth over immediacy.

What Fitz captures here, knowingly or not, sits inside a longer tradition of recordings that treat imperfection as evidence rather than error, the kind pioneered by folk archivists like Alan Lomax, who prized a performance caught in its actual conditions over one polished into abstraction.

“A Rock and a Hard Place” operates on a similar principle: the car park where it was written and the single take where it was recorded are structurally part of what the song communicates.

The subject, an artist pushed to a point where he can no longer perform anything but the truth, only makes sense delivered this way.

A cleaner version, cut with time to reconsider every phrase, would argue against its own content.

There is something to be said, too, for what this approach asks of listeners, more used to hearing exhaustion narrated than enacted. Fitz does not describe being tired; the take itself carries the evidence, in small imperfections a producer might have been tempted to erase.

For an artist stepping into his debut era, that is a considerable gamble, betting that audiences will read rawness as authority rather than as a lack of resources.

A hometown show at Coughlan’s that sold out in under twenty hours, and a live television slot that introduced him nationally, suggest the gamble has paid off so far.

What remains after the last note is less a resolution than a question: how much of ourselves are we willing to let a room, or a microphone, hear unfiltered, and what do we lose the moment we tidy it up?