Cathleen Ireland’s “In the City”: Neon, Sweat, and the Eternal Whoa

Cathleen Ireland isn’t whispering here—she’s bellowing from the roof of a downtown parking garage with a six-pack in one hand and a transistor radio in the other, hollering at the skyline until the echo slaps her back. “In the City” isn’t a subtle record. It’s a lust letter to neon, to fireworks over dirty rivers, to sweaty late-night jams where rhythm is the oxygen and the hook is the heartbeat.

The thing about these lyrics—“I WANNA TASTE THAT CITY LIFE / LET’S GO TO THE CITY TONIGHT / OH WHOA! IN THE CITY!”—is that they’re not poetry in the leather-bound sense. They’re graffiti scrawled on the bathroom wall of your favorite dive, etched in Sharpie by a half-drunk romantic who still believes in Saturday night salvation. There’s a glorious lack of pretense here. She’s not trying to reinvent Dylan or confound Leonard Cohen. She’s chasing a feeling, and the words tumble out like sparks from a busted streetlight: jagged, glowing, alive.

And that chorus—sweet mother of all hooks—it’s as if she’s pounding the word “CITY” into your skull until you can’t escape it. The repetition becomes mantra, invocation, maybe even exorcism. By the third round, you’re not listening anymore, you’re chanting with her, demanding that the night crack open and give up its electricity.

Production-wise, Ryan M. Tedder gives Ireland a slick but muscular playground. The beat throbs like a subway car at rush hour, bass lines sliding greasy against shimmering synths. It’s groove-driven pop, sure, but there’s grit under the polish. You can practically smell the hot asphalt rising with the rhythm. Ireland’s vocal delivery is the engine—equal parts sensual purr and raw exclamation point. When she drops “I CRAVE SOMETHING CON ALMA / WE CAN MEET AT CON ALMA” she’s not just dropping a local reference, she’s teleporting you to a Pittsburgh jazz joint where the cocktails are stiff and the band is tight enough to make your knees weak.

What’s striking is how she balances the universal and the local. Anyone who’s ever wanted to get lost in the buzz of nightlife can plug into this, but Pittsburgh listeners will grin at the incline, the skyline, the casino—all name-checks that ground the fantasy in a real place with steel bones. It’s mythmaking by way of municipal tourism, and it works.

Is it high art? Hell no. It’s better—it’s pulse-art. It’s music that takes your Friday night boredom, smashes it against a neon sign, and hands you the fragments glowing hot in your palms. “In the City” is messy, repetitive, euphoric, and very much alive. Just like the city it celebrates.

–Leslie Banks