Dark noise songs12/29/2023 ![]() “Our mindset was no longer just: ‘Let’s write a post-punk track.’” says Duggan. Ideas again came from unexpected quarters: their heavy use of filters was influenced by Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs, while country crooner Ray Price inspired the postmodern Capgras, where an overdubbed Kiely narrates the band’s hardcore thrash like a director’s commentary. Embracing post-production and the-studio-as-instrument, they employed loops and Logic, twisting their post-Sonic Youth din into jarring new shapes. “But then they said: ‘You can be in a bubble with three other people.’ We were like: ‘That’s enough for us!’” Investing in recording gear, the quartet ensconced themselves at their rehearsal space new directions were explored, old working practices exorcised. “We had numerous lockdowns in Ireland,” says Duggan. Drawing unlikely inspiration from Marvin Gaye’s 1971 song-suite What’s Going On, many songs shared key tonal references, while Kiely’s lyrics eschewed the veiled autobiography of the debut for depersonalised, conceptual conceits such as abandoning pronouns or writing solely in palindromes as on Aibohphobia.īut after a handful of shows in support of The Talkies, Covid prematurely halted touring. But the future of the band seemed inconsequential compared to the situation at hand.” The bond between the quartet strengthened as Kiely worked on his recovery, and in 2019 they decamped to Ballintubbert House, an old country house in County Laois, to make The Talkies. The hiatus was, Duggan adds, “a disappointment, for sure. ![]() ![]() I had to learn a lot, and it was very, very tough to get through.” I was burnt out, I wasn’t living correctly Dara Kiely I was being an idiot and not nice to be around, and I didn’t really like myself. I gave a lot of myself in those performances and I didn’t really sleep. And as we kept playing it live, I became more and more anxious. That screaming closing track of Holding Hands With Jamie, The Witch Dr, “literally described what it had been like to have ‘an episode’. “I was burnt out, I wasn’t living correctly,” Kiely says now. Early in 2017, the group cancelled all their imminent tour dates and went on indefinite hiatus. But as promotional duties wore on, Kiely’s mental health worsened, after an earlier psychotic episode that had kept him awake for eight days followed by a “massive comedown” and a period in hospital. By 2015, the group had signed to Rough Trade, released their exhilaratingly cacophonous debut album and found themselves on the precipice of unlikely crossover success. Girl Band’s early, chaotic gigs held their peers in thrall – fellow Dublin band Fontaines DC cite them as a formative inspiration – while a brace of highly collectible early singles (released on formats including a handmade plywood box containing a flexidisc that erodes every time it’s played) charted their evolution away from traditional song structures. “We were choosing the road less travelled.” They picked it as the A-side to their 2012 debut single to “divorce ourselves from what we were trying to do in Harrows”, says Kiely. Newcomer Adam Faulkner took the drum stool, Kiely became vocalist, and their first song, In My Head, climaxed with his blood-curdling screaming. (They changed their name to Gilla Band in late 2021: “We just didn’t feel like it was on, for the four of us to be called Girl Band any more,” says Duggan.) Other influences included hard-edged techno, bloody-minded US noisers Pissed Jeans and, says Kiely, “pretty much every artist name-checked on LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge”. No wave was the primary inspiration for their new group, Girl Band. We thought we were gonna be massive.” He grins: “Thank God nothing happened.” “Arctic Monkeys had a real fucking chokehold over our generation.” Nevertheless, Duggan says there was “some interest from Sony Ireland. They weren’t always this way: in their teens, three-quarters of Gilla Band were members of Dublin indie rockers Harrows. This turbulent masterpiece is the work of musicians committed to the creative possibilities within discomfiting sounds. “If there’s a linear progression happening through these records, this next record should feel like you’re wandering through a dreamscape.” But for all his talk of reading up on “dream cycles and circadian rhythms”, Most Normal’s vibe is closer to nightmare, its wilful rollercoaster of noise strafing listeners with distortion as Kiely pinballs between surrealist gabble and desperate, paint-stripping howls. Their second, 2019’s The Talkies, “opened with him having a panic attack and ended with him breathing calmly”, he explains. Their first, 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, ended with frontman Dara Kiely screaming. G illa Band guitarist Al Duggan is unpicking the loose concept behind the Irish group’s third album, Most Normal.
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