Picture This

In Ireland Picture This are Super Stars; their debut single ‘Take My Hand’ is a veritable anthem, the only band ever to sell out 5 successive 3 Arenas (Dublin’s equivalent to London’s O2), and the 4 huge arena shows in Belfast and Dublin in December 2025 sold out in less than one hour with 50k tickets sold. Where did it all begin?

In the small rural Irish town of Athy lived four young men. They each grew up in what is, as estimated by drummer Jimmy Rainsford, a “grey area, a melting pot of craziness and characters” and had interconnected relationships as you tend to do if you’re from a tiny place: they knew each other or vaguely of each other. But it wasn’t until singer Ryan Hennessy uploaded an iPhone video of himself performing an original song onto social media that their shared success story began.

That footage for ‘Take My Hand’ went viral in their home country in 2015 and among those whose hearts and minds it set alight was touring drummer Jimmy, who was back at home with his parents burned out and doubting his chosen career path. There, in front of his screen, he had a premonition that Ryan, then 20-years-old, was his ticket to a whole new legitimised level of musicianship. “Why it was so shocking was that Ryan wasn’t a musician, he wasn’t even a singer – he was a footballer! – but here he was singing and writing songs,” recalls Jimmy, who reached out to him. “I’d always wanted a vehicle to get properly into the music industry as an artist. It was strange that the two of us were from this same town and I was looking for the same thing Ryan was looking for.”

It was true that Ryan was an unlikely contender for frontman of Ireland’s biggest up-and-coming pop band. He grew up on an estate, doing activities relevant for teenage boys like him. Though he wrote poetry in private because his Dad and Grandad had, “you couldn’t walk out into the street and go look at this poem I wrote,” Ryan says. “It was football, clothes and girls and if I saw someone walk down the hall in school with a guitar, I’d be like, really?” When he was 18, he reluctantly chose music as a subject in his final year of school. Since he didn’t play instruments or know music programming, singing was his only option. “When I knew I had to sing at school, I went down to my Dad in the living room and sang an Irish traditional song in front of him to make sure I wasn’t terrible,” remembers Ryan. “He was speechless. The first thing he said was ‘where has this come from? I’ve never even heard you sing around the house.’ After that, everyone told me I had to be a musician and writing poetry turned into music.”

This was a sharp contrast to Jimmy’s upbringing: the youngest of 9 in a musical family living in the outer countryside of Athy. “My family are always hugely supportive, especially my parents. When I first got a drum kit as a kid, my parents let me set it up in their bedroom. I would sneak in every morning and lightly play as they pretended to still be asleep,” says Jimmy. He credits that environment, where ABBA and The Beatles played from his sister’s room and arguments were mainly about who got access to the shared Walkman before bed, along with the local Youth Club with nurturing his talent and love of music. It was

in that Club where Jimmy met the band’s Owen Cardiff as a child and where Owen’s Dad taught him to play his first chords.

Together, Ryan and Jimmy re-recorded and released ‘Take My Hand’. Immediately, they became the Irish buzz band of the moment. The demand was there for a gig, which sold out in 30 seconds, and had to be upgraded to the nearly 1000-cap venue The Academy. “When I started singing I used to make people turn the other way around because I didn’t want them to see me – I was so nervous,” Ryan says. “I remember Jimmy standing in Jimmy’s studio going ‘I can’t do it, it’s impossible, I can never ever stand on stage and sing and play guitar’, which I was learning at the time. Jimmy said there was no choice – the demand was so great.” Jimmy was ecstatic with passion for Ryan’s talent and what they could do with it. “I knew with this band there was going to be no ceiling with how successful we could be – and that’s actually really scary,” says Jimmy.

They needed two more members to create Picture This, a full-band and gigging entity. Jimmy asked Cliff Deane, a local guitarist and friend who naturally had seen Ryan’s viral video, if he’d join. “Whatever you need, I’m here, I’ll drive anywhere, I just need to be in this band,” Cliff said at the time. “Because I just knew straight away when I heard Ryan sing, this guy is not a local normal singer. He’s not going to be a guy that just sings in the pubs on the weekends – this guy is destined for a lot more. I knew he needed good people around him and that could be me and we could make it.”

Owen was a musician who grew up on Ryan’s estate and worked a high-powered job with travel opportunities at Intel making computer chips when he got the call from Jimmy. Though Owen missed the initial debut Picture This gig, he was in bed in America on a work trip watching it as someone in attendance video-called him. “The minute it was over I emailed my boss saying that I’m going to hand my notice in when I get home,” Owen says. “It still is the talk of the factory.” Owen’s career risk paid off: no sooner than Picture This began in full force, the four men were playing stadium shows across Ireland, supported The Jonas Brothers on their UK and European shows and headlined their local Electric Picnic Festival. Their first four albums have received notoriety and critical success in Ireland, including number 1 releases on the albums chart and endless Top 40 hits.

Much of this achievement is down to their distinct and defined roles within the band, each member complimenting and supporting the others. Unequivocally, they believe Ryan is the star and one of Ireland’s truest current musical geniuses. According to Jimmy, without Ryan’s looks, angelic voice and poetic lyricism there would be no Picture This. “I’m always pushing Ryan out the door – saying go, do it. And I’ll be right there behind the scenes,” Jimmy says, who himself is the leader and backbone of the band.

“It’s always been Jimmy pushing me and showing me all this potential in me that I don’t realise,” says Ryan. “It’s a very selfless role that Jimmy plays, knowing that it’s going to benefit us. He’s my cheerleader and if Jimmy didn’t believe in me, I don’t know where I’d be in my life right now – I was on my way down the bad road, until music.” As for Owen, he acts as the joker of the band, providing light relief when it’s needed, while Cliff has the people skills necessary for fame: interfacing with the music industry and fans, managing that so the surprisingly shy and reserved frontman Ryan doesn’t have to.

But beyond that, Picture This are not your average male pop group. Though they have pop bangers in their arsenal, soaring stadium tracks and electronic-leaning dance-a-long numbers, everything they make is heartfelt and genuinely special. “It’s not surface level pop music,” explains Jimmy. “When you come from a rural town with not much opportunity, everyone’s a lot more emotional, everything’s a lot deeper, because that’s all you have. When things are easy you don’t need to access emotion as much. I find that whenever I go home, there’s a lot of deep trauma and emotion there that is stewing all the time and the only way people can talk about it properly is through an art form like song.”

To explain the soul of Picture This, Ryan points to the archetype of the Irishman 50 years ago: highly expressive, prone to writing poetry and making art. “They were putting their feelings out there constantly and I think there’s a new wave of Irish men who are more willing to express themselves in an open way,” says Ryan. You can see Ryan embody that in the way he compulsively writes, sharing dozens – hundreds – of songs in a Dropbox with the other members, with them barely having a chance to keep up. “With songwriting – I can’t stop, I wish I could stop writing, I drive myself mental constantly writing all the time,” he says. “I can’t have a conversation with anyone without writing a song in my head. It’s a blessing too because I know musicians who struggle to write…but they’re not Irish.”

Their ambitions have scaled: they now want to be the greatest new stadium pop rock band in the world. Building on the rich legacy of Irish pop bands – U2, The Script, Snow Patrol – Picture This intends to fill the gap in the 2020s market for those who miss the 00s era when Kings of Leon and The Killers reigned large. “We love bands who play big anthems and there isn’t a lot of that anymore,” laments Jimmy. “We saw that as a niche. It’s ingrained in our culture and it feels right that we would be that next band together.”

They’ll do this, they say, by focusing on being a straight-forward band, stripping away the electronic elements they’ve looked to in the past, for this fifth album. “If you look back over the decades, real bands that played real music, their songs are still around,” muses Cliff. “I think a lot of that is because there’s personality to them. You can produce a song with a singer and one producer and it sounds incredible, but you just don’t get that personality.”

This is not the start of the journey for the four men from Athy but it is a fresh start, one with renewed purpose, clarity of their intent and the ambition to be your next favourite pop band – wherever in the world you’re from.