Girl Band, Gilla Band - Just another nervous breakdown

In the second half of the 2010s in England, it was the subject of Brexit that captured musicians' attention, through the grime of Skepta and Stormzy, the acidic urban poetry of Kate Tempest and Sleaford Mods, and the electric rage expressed by Shame and Idles. On the Irish side, however, it was introspective analysis that reigned, the offspring of a troubled era. These are hard times: on one hand, the world of social media where comfortable, reassuring posts triumph, with small daily goals almost always achieved. The pretty side of the story, the one meant for public display. On the flip side of the coin we find frustration, discontent, unease, anguish, panic, anxiety, depression, to the delight of psychologists and psychiatric hospitals whose waiting rooms fill up a little more every day.
This time we're telling the story of a musician who really did stand in those queues, and often skipped them too, out of sheer urgency. We're talking about mental health issues, the ones that have marked the existence of one of the most complex frontmen of the 2010s, Dara Kiely, from Dublin. It's a story that, from an artistic standpoint, is inextricably bound to that of the band he fronted, whose name is nothing short of misleading: Girl Band. If Ian Curtis were still alive, we're certain that today his distress would sound more or less like their songs.

The Dubliners

The quartet's origin story follows the same path as many other bands that take their first steps around the age of 16, in the classrooms of secondary school – the very same route that, for instance, their fellow Dubliners U2 set out on in the late '70s. You see each other at school in the morning, and once the bell rings you spend afternoons and evenings rehearsing in the basement. In the beginning there were the Harrows, a band with unmistakably indie-rock instincts, in which Dara Kiely, at the time behind the drums, guitarist Alan Duggan and bassist Daniel Fox (three quarters of the future Girl Band) played alongside Kevin Towey (guitar) and Ben Wadel, who took on vocal duties.
As was common in the 2000s, a few tracks were uploaded to MySpace. One of their homemade, self-produced videos, shot amid Sonic Youth t-shirts and Nine Inch Nails posters, with an unmistakable Strokes-esque mood, "Leave Again" — not bad at all — was uploaded to YouTube on November 15, 2008, where it can still be viewed today. Despite the promising start, however, the Harrows never managed to find their own path, though they did end up serving as the formative training ground that led to the next line-up, with Kiely promoted to the role of frontman and Adam Faulkner brought in to replace him behind the kit.

The Early Years

In July 2011 the four of them christened themselves Girl Band. Less than a year later, in April 2012, their debut single arrived, "In My Head", released by the label Any Other City, a track that stirred quite a bit of curiosity online. The primal indie roots are now smothered under hefty doses of wave, and dissonances that recall the New York noise school, a kind of happy mashup of Interpol and Sonic Youth. But above all, in the second half of the track, Kiely's harrowing screams break through for the first time, proving to the world that he could seize the microphone without a shred of reverence.
The following October saw the arrival of six tracks that Any Other City compiled into the EP France 98, recorded live and self-produced by the band themselves, available as a free download from their Bandcamp page. While the opening "You're A Dog" recalls the post-hardcore of Canada's Metz, "That Snake Conor Cusack" edges closer to a less rambling Motorpsycho, and the frantic title track crystallizes into a brief sonic delirium that detonates in under a minute; it's "Second One" in particular that opens the door to intriguing future possibilities, naturally blending together Strokes and Nirvana. The band is on the hunt for that personal touch that would lift them above their reference points. They show they can handle a range of moods, which would soon coalesce into a lethal brew. Although there's still work to be done on the originality front, France 98 is undoubtedly an excellent first outing.

The spotlight was now on them, and further interest was sparked by their highly successful cover of "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage", originally recorded by Blawan, a musician from the techno world. Throughout 2014 a series of seven-inches followed, cementing the band's reputation, at least within the borders of the UK, which would later be collected on the EP The Early Years.
By this point Girl Band were regarded as the leading next big thing on Irish soil, and it wasn't long before labels capable of promoting them to a wider audience came calling. Rough Trade Records won out, stepping forward decisively and guaranteeing the band full creative control over future records. And so it was. In December 2014 the band signed to Geoff Travis's label, which on April 21, 2015 released The Early Years, even though the singles it contained had previously been put out by Any Other City.

Stories Of Breakdowns And Foods

Meanwhile, five years had passed since Girl Band first took their earliest steps, careful groundwork that finally culminated, on September 30, 2015, in their first proper album, Holding Hands With Jamie, reviewed on OndaRock with Swiss punctuality by Fabio Guastalla, who unflinchingly highlights the crooked, noise-driven approach of the new compositions, pushed well beyond anything the previously released tracks had hinted at. In thirty-eight minutes of unprecedented expressive urgency, the band hurls itself beyond the confines of the "post-punk" and "noise" labels, arming itself with strong post-hardcore influences, ragged screams, corrosive riffs and industrial detours, in a formula that ideally starts from Husker Du and Mission Of Burma and arrives at the apathetic fury of Iceage and the no-wave schizophrenia of Liars.
Having abandoned the rules of song form they'd experimented with up to that point, and torn up any possible blueprint, Holding Hands With Jamie stands as a raw, overflowing work, deliberately dirty and imperfect, the manifesto of a band that refuses to bow to any preset rule, in which Kiely's ravings act as a guide along a path bristling with noise-ridden edges, voiced through a Luciferian rage forever on the verge of exploding.
The sonic blasts of "Umbongo" are merely the intimidating, savage welcome to a journey that steadily piles on dissonant shades ("Pears For Lunch"), industrial specters ("Baloo", "Paul", halfway between Nine Inch Nails and Suicide), disjointed urban ballads ("In Plastic", "Texting An Alien"), uncontrolled fury (the hyper-concentrated "The Last Riddler"), right up to the nearly eight-minute time bomb "Fuckin Better", which serves as the expressive summa of this debut.
At the bottom of the tracklist, "The Witch Dr." sums up the idea of punk as understood by the Irish band, built around a metronome gone haywire with its substance dissolving into a chaotic finale.

At this point the name Girl Band gained real notoriety and clout, eventually becoming a touchstone for the entire new Dublin rock scene, so much so that in interviews given in later years by rising stars of the time, such as Fontaines D.C. or Murder Capital, Girl Band are frequently cited as the band that lit the fuse. Their live shows were incendiary, and the quartet was invited to record a session for KEXP, a further seal of quality for the band. But just when things seemed about to take off and the doors to success appeared ready to open, the very issue that had helped shape the band's distinctive lyrics and atmospheres on one hand would, on the other, come to undermine its stability and survival.
Dara Kiely sank deeper into his mental health struggles, was forced to stop, and Girl Band had to cancel two tours, one in 2015 and another in 2017. What could have become a story for the rock history books now seemed irrevocably headed for a premature ending. Many fellow Irish artists would go on citing Girl Band as beacons of the new Dublin scene, but the feeling keeps growing stronger that there will never be a follow-up to those snapshots of lucid madness.

A New Beginning

Until the summer of 2019, when a new song, "Shoulderblades", was suddenly released. Not only that, but just a few days later came the announcement of an album that could be released at the start of the following autumn. Anticipation builds, skilfully stoked by the online release of another new track, "Going Norway", complete with a video directed, like almost all the others, by their friend Bob Gallagher. Two tracks that confirm a quality standard well above average, hinting at the imminent arrival of a great second record.

On 27 September 2019, Rough Trade released The Talkies, Girl Band's second full-length, chosen by OndaRock as Album of the Month for October. After four decidedly complicated years, the band follow up their explosive debut, honing the ferocity of a songwriting style now able to blend, in a highly personal way, nightmares straddling new wave, no-wave, Glenn Branca, kraut, noise and industrial. From the very first listens, The Talkies carves out its own place within that destructured lineage running from Radiohead's "Kid A" through to Low's "Double Negative", but while in those cases it was the electronic element that prevailed, here it's Dara Kiely's schizoid state of mind, his psychic distress, that defines the record's attitude.
The Talkies is no fiction: what you hear is Kiely's reality, unfiltered, his delirium, his panic attacks, backed by a band that indulges him, that has waited for him — first and foremost bassist Daniel Fox, who shapes the sound. He's the one responsible for producing the album, he's the one who decides how far to push the analogue side of the recordings and where to drive the manipulations, in a work of research and sonic experimentation capable of steering the band towards new horizons, still unknown even to the band itself. It's a record that reads as a sign of the times: nervous, post-apocalyptic, advancing amid tortured screams and instruments often played in deeply unconventional ways, steeped in a paranoia rendered utterly convincing by Kiely through indecipherable lyrics hovering between the abstract and the absurd.
A voice somewhere between Mark E. Smith and John Lydon, dissonant guitars that couldn't care less about harmony, decomposed, fractured music, at times even oppressive, especially on the longer tracks, the hardest to digest, tough going but kept alive by sudden changes of direction. Everything here induces anxiety, starting with the opener "Prolix", where Kiely's increasingly ragged breathing is a sick reimagining of the heartbeat that served as the intro to "The Dark Side Of The Moon", another record built around madness and obsession, whose second track was, fittingly, "Breathe".
The most surprising tracks, though, are the shortest ones, like "Aibohphobia", which distills Dara's passion for palindromes, or "Akineton", which sounds like it was produced inside a steel mill: the ground shakes amid sirens and distorted instruments, you risk losing your balance in this descent into hell, in which the four Dubliners let noise and industrial take over from the wave-rooted foundations. "Amygdela" captures one of Kiely's moments of madness, pummelled here by sonic machine-gun fire while he rambles nonsensical phrases.
"Caveat" draws on big beat, twisting it into something almost Picasso-esque. "Salmon Of Knowledge" even opens with a jazzy gait before plunging into acid, derailing and slowly dying. The atmosphere turns suffocating on "Laggard", white noise and tribal drumming, then a whispered nursery rhyme. And there's no escape either from the hallucinated, sandpaper-rough crescendo of "Shoulderblades". The flayed melody of "Prefab Castle" arrives near the end, pointing towards the road of no return, but there's no horror without some comfort, and the closing "Ereignis" means to leave a small crack of light open.

The post-pandemic era

When the band returned with new music in 2022, they did so in a completely altered landscape — not only because of a pandemic not yet fully defeated, a disproportionate surge in energy prices capable of bringing the entire global economy to its knees, and an absurd war tearing apart a nation on the borders of the European Union. On the musical scene of the Old Continent, several bands born on Irish soil — Fontaines D.C. above all — had risen to prominence, acts for whom Girl Band can be considered something like godfathers.
But the band themselves wanted to change something, deciding that the name they had used until then failed to respect a culture of inclusivity. From then on, the quartet chose to call themselves Gilla Band, and under that name, on 7 November, they released their third album, Most Normal, once again on Rough Trade.

The devastating, schizophrenic approach hasn't shifted an inch: the jittery vocals and deranged guitars packed into "The Gum" open Most Normal, immediately slamming the listener with an unstable, wavering, terribly anxious sound. Kiely admits to having serious issues with clothes and with low-cost airlines. Having blown all his money on cheap shitty clothes, on "Eight Fivers" he unleashes heavy noise artillery against rampant consumerism, accused of flattening the masses into conformity. The theme returns on "Bin Liner Fashion": fragments of melody buried under multiple layers of sonic debris serve as backdrop to a protagonist who chooses to dress in plastic bags and tinfoil. During the ferocious minute in which the thoroughly sick "Capgras" plays out, Kiely declares: "I hate Ryanair".
There's never anything reassuring here, nor do the four seem to harbour any ambition toward mainstream success — just listen to the steel-mill noise worked up in "Gushie" and in the first half of "The Weirds". If they build a groove, as on "Backwash" and "Red Polo Neck", they feel entitled to blow it apart with napalm storms. If they decide to rip someone off, they disguise themselves as a sludgy Strokes cover band ("Almost Soon"), slowly sinking under blows dealt by their own instruments. If they pretend to recite a prayer ("Pratfall"), they dissolve it in the acid of the most extreme industrial noise. At times the distorted sounds seem to come from the flat next door, where a party we weren't invited to is underway, and through the walls we can make out desperation and retching.
Savage and vicious, every song (including the pseudo-normal closer "Post Ryan") carries disruptive elements that make it hard going. The record was built by treating the recording studio as an added member of the band, drawing inspiration from Radiohead's "Kid A" and Low's "Double Negative". Most Normal thus becomes a non-place in which musical matter is shredded to pieces and then reassembled into different, unprecedented shapes. Abstract architectures combine with often surreal lyrics drawn from the world of dreams, layered together to conjure cubist nightmares populated by giant wasps and insolent barbers. Kiely's inventions, supported musically and morally by the rest of the band, serve a curative function against his own afflictions, but given everything the band has been through, it's a miracle these guys have managed to complete and release three albums in ten years: let's hold on to them tight.

Even though they constantly find themselves one step away from becoming a band of wider popularity, Gilla Band seem determined to avoid it, refusing to give an inch on their intention to make "disturbing" records. Listening to any of their projects is bound to put the listener through the wringer, and even Pugnello, released in September 2026, misses no chance to create a situation of genuine discomfort, both physical and emotional. You listen to their instruments, you perceive them, you recognize them, but gradually they morph into a dense industrial-noise tangle that's hard to decode, and objectively impossible to replicate for anyone hoping to pinch a few of their little secrets. This time, the credit seems to go (alongside the work done by bassist Daniel Fox, an increasingly sought-after producer) to a cutting-edge synth, the Perkons-HD-01, capable of processing sound and making it distinctively theirs. For a couple of thousand euros you too can get your hands on the nifty device. "The Angelus", placed at the start of the tracklist, immediately comes across as a kind of dissonant nuclear apocalypse, during which the three musicians (alongside Fox there's guitarist Alan Duggan Borges and drummer Adam Faulkner) build a wild ball of sound. "Crisp Pop" is another fitting example of an impenetrable wall, a track that sounds like the clatter of a speeding train, a rhythm that's ultimately danceable, though it aims to drag us not so much into a nightclub as on a visit inside a steelworks, shaping almost eight minutes of sonic torture. If we need a point of comparison, Gilla Band could be considered the My Bloody Valentine of the new millennium, for their firm resolve to turn the sounds of their instruments into something utterly unconventional.
Moving on to the lyrics, Dara Kiely – the band's singer – once again draws on his own mental health struggles, alternating scornful spoken-word delivery with inhuman screams. But in Pugnello a second recurring theme is introduced: the processing of a grief that struck Kiely directly, the death of his father, with whom he'd always had a complicated, fragmentary relationship. In these songs Kiely channels all his anger, frustration, and difficulty in processing the pain, eventually recognizing his own numbness even in the face of such immense distress, in the liberating, self-aware cry "I should be more sad". The grief also surfaces in the closing "At The Gallop", an imagined conversation between him and his late father. The track's title is identical to that of the 1975 album by the progressive rock band his father Michael played in, Cromwell, a choice that makes the message even more pointed. Such "heavy" subject matter is constantly offset through ironic writing, built on wordplay, nonsense, outlandish jokes, and unexpected references to pop culture, at times barely audible: the words are frequently swallowed up by the sound the band generates. All of it is grafted onto an uncontrolled stream of consciousness, sprung from the frontman's own nightmares. In "Crisp Pop" Kiely pairs Britpop bands with crisp flavors, elsewhere he name-checks Power Rangers, Diet Coke, Teletubbies, Bananas in Pyjamas and Coldplay, blending despair and sarcasm in the process. "Placeholder" comes across as a form of ultra-noisy funk, the energetic "Jacobson" is violent techno played with traditional instruments, a kind of futuristic kraut, a "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco taken to its most extreme exasperation. The ten tracks are tormented, brutal, unsettling, steeped in a constant sense of disorientation, an off-putting anti-pop that at times turns into pressing dance music, as exemplified during "Giraffe", which suddenly changes direction through a deft tempo shift that transforms the whole thing into an actual rave party.
These are among the few liberating moments amid tons of almost unbearable tension. Pugnello could be regarded as a form of postmodern Dadaism centered on the most intimate traumas, a radical project perfectly in keeping with everything the Irish outfit has recorded so far. On "Alogia", a clinical term indicating the poverty of language affecting people with mental disorders, Kiely directly confronts his schizophrenia diagnosis with unsettling clarity; in the chaotic, anguished din of "The Megazord", amid the atonal shrieks of "Computer Sadness", in the maddening ticking of "Three Hands Clapping", it feels as though you're facing a faulty sound signal. The band always moves as one, like a cannonball fired at a stone wall, a bomb packed with vertigo, anguish, hostility, nausea, rendered through sonic layering that generates chaos, blurring any reasonable boundary between post-punk, industrial-noise, no wave and techno music.
In the four years since the previous album, each member of Gilla Band has pursued other artistic endeavors: Kiely has nurtured a passion for painting, Faulkner has drummed for fellow Irish act Lankum, Fox has specialized in production work, and Borges has launched the solo project Null Club. But it's only when all four come back together that they manage to raise the bar on what's possible today with a guitar, a bass, a drum kit, a fine array of effects pedals, and a voice as sincere and effective as this. Right up until it all morphs into something else entirely, amid walls of distortion and warped tonalities.

More than a decade on from their debut, Gilla Band remain the most singular example of everything that has happened around the new post-punk scene over the past fifteen years.

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