Aoife Wolf exposes the lonely underbelly of the earth on "A Ringing in the Ear"

Aoife Wolf might be based in Belfast, but her home will always be somewhere among the wetlands of rural Offaly. That corner of the world, she says, is a place "you can really hear your thoughts". For all its apparent stillness, there's a whole ecosystem holding its breath beneath this spongey, decaying mass, out of which Neolithic axeheads and urns of Iron Age butter periodically bob to the surface.

But as her new song "A Ringing in the Ear" points out, hearing your thoughts isn't all it's cracked up to be – and the music video has enough folk horror credentials to prove it. Among unremarkable city streets, the sight of Aoife submerged under an enormous woven headdress strikes a chilling note. Beyond the odd smoky glimpse of her band playing to a deserted room, her face stays shrouded beneath the mask, totally unreadable.

Watching her float down the street in that monstrous thing, it's anyone's guess if she's headed for a bus stop or a funeral pyre. “I have a fascination with Mummers and masks in general," she counters. "So we got two headdresses made by a woman in County Leitrim who would only accept cash in the post as a means of payment.”

In an era where cash feels as elusive as any talisman, this insistence on earthly materials is a passable metaphor for the way Aoife puts songs together too. Recording purely to tape, she revels more in happy accidents than studio sorcery. But even at its most confessional, her psychedelia-leaning folk can evade matters of the heart with sludgy basslines and walls of feedback. Is music something to be worn as a form of protection?

Maybe. Previous release "The Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol" adopted a biographical approach to songwriting, delving deep into the paranoia and confusion of maligned artist Valerie Solanas. Protected by the armour of someone else's story, Aoife stared unflinchingly into the camera, confrontational yet able to hold something back.

For the most part, however, her music shudders with unspoken stories of the earth. Offaly is known for its peat bogs, where the land can simply give way without warning. Aoife Wolf's music makes a case for human emotion being just as capricious and difficult to fathom. "'A Ringing in the Ear'", she explains, is "quite literally about loneliness, something at the time I felt could only be drowned out and not really cured, like our old pal tinnitus.”

When Aoife talks about loneliness, it doesn't feel like any kind of wineglass-in-hand, laptop-on-pillow loose end, but something far more deep and primeval. Her music summons black night skies, jammed signal, the squeal of creatures being carried off as prey. But here at last she fights the instinct to flee, forcing herself to stare deep into the depths of her own psyche.