Album of the Year – Daria Kulesh ‘MotherLand’
Written by celtic music radio on December 26, 2025
The 2025 Celtic Music Radio Album of the Year winner is DARIA KULESH and her wonderful release, MotherLand.
When our listeners’ poll was launched, Daria wrote on social media: “Winning would be unexpected; it would also be a Christmas miracle and a huge boost to my independent music career.”
Congratulations to Daria and to all the terrific musicians who won an Album of the Week accolade on the station this year.
MotherLand is a product of surviving lockdowns as a new mum, a visceral reaction to our increasingly unstable and torn world, where she’s feeling cut off from her own troubled homeland – Russia – and, more specifically, Ingushetia in the North Caucasus.
The styles and stories on MotherLand are mixed and varied with tracks of war and exile, protest and rebellion as well as songs of peace and joy, salvation and escape.
Daria delivers ballads of fear and of love but she also offers rich tales, dipping into several languages and spanning a huge geographic area: from the summit of Everest, via the Highlands of Caucasus, to the Western Isles of Scotland; from a slave ship in the Atlantic to a snowy village in Ukraine.
These are songs of the past, the present and a hope for the future, against all the odds. And above it all, the album – featuring a stellar cast of instrumentalists – is a plea for peace.
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