Iona Zajac has been enjoying illustrious company this year. You might have seen her as tour support to the likes of Arab Strap, Alison Moyet and Lisa O’Neill or onstage with The Pogues in their latest line-up, convened to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their classic album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, putting her in the privileged position of having a performer’s eye view of a Pogues Barrowlands audience in full flow. ‘They’ve always said they were their wildest gigs,’ says Zajac. ‘It doesn’t even feel like a gig, it feels like some ritualistic ceremony.’

Zajac sings and plays harp in the band but she is also garnering attention for her own arresting music and solo shows, armed with guitar, an intoxicating singing voice and a batch of dark, classy songs which are collected on her debut album, Bang.

She hails from a family of performers. Her father is theatremaker Matthew Zajac, best known for his play and book The Tailor Of Inverness, inspired by his Polish father. She currently lives in London with her 90-year-old maternal grandfather, but grew up in Edinburgh, studied and started her music career in Glasgow and immersed herself in Dublin’s alternative folk scene for a couple of years, living with Lankum’s Daragh Lynch, hanging out with The Mary Wallopers in their garden pub and first meeting The Pogues’ Spider Stacy. ‘I’m as confused as everyone else is about where I’m based,’ she admits. ‘It has something to do with how difficult the cost of living is everywhere. Dublin is the most expensive city in Europe at the moment in terms of rent but I was living briefly in a house that was being squatted.’

Although her own songs tend towards dramatic alt.pop balladry, her bedrock is folk music. She attended the Feis and Hands Up For Trad’s Tinto Summer School from a young age, gravitating to clarsach (a type of harp). ‘That was the instrument I was obsessed with until I became a grumpy teenager and stopped playing it,’ she says. Later, she used her harp skills to bewitching effect in her first band, the folk-jazz trio Avocet, before taking up guitar during lockdown and writing her first original songs. ‘With my limited knowledge of the guitar, that became an interesting process. I was experimenting and it turned into something by magic. I wanted to establish myself without the harp so I wasn’t known as the harpist and then, maybe like Lizzo with the flute, I would just whip it out at some point.’

Her second album is already in the works as Bang makes its way into the world. Speaking of her debut, she admits there’s quite a lot of anger in the record. ‘The other thing that runs through it is how I cope with life, and difficult experiences in particular, which is quite often through comedy or surreal experiences and strange dreams I have. I’m trying to flip heaviness on its head and dance on top of it. I want to both challenge and relax a listener and I love playing with discomforts.’

Bang is released by Post Electric on Friday 21 November; Iona Zajac is touring the UK and Ireland until Thursday 27 November.