GIRL BAND - Pugnello

Despite constantly finding themselves a step away from becoming a band of wider popularity, Gilla Band seem determined to avoid it, refusing to budge an inch from their intent to make "disturbing" records. Listening to any of their projects is bound to put the listener through the wringer, and "Pugnello" is no exception, never missing a chance to create 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 secrets. This time the credit seems to go (besides the work done by bassist Daniel Fox, an increasingly sought-after producer) to a next-generation synth, the Perkons-HD-01, capable of processing sound and making it personal. For a couple thousand euros you too can get your hands on this nifty piece of kit.
"The Angelus", placed at the start of the tracklist, immediately presents itself 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 noise. "Crisp Pop" is another fitting example of an impenetrable wall of sound, a track that sounds like the clattering of a speeding train, a rhythm that's ultimately danceable, though it aims to drag us not so much into a club as on a visit inside a steelworks, shaping nearly eight minutes of sonic torture. If we had to find a point of comparison, Gilla Band could be considered the My Bloody Valentine of the new millennium, for their firm will 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 emerges: processing a loss that struck Kiely directly, namely the death of his father, with whom he'd always had a complicated, fragmentary relationship. Across these songs Kiely channels all his rage, his frustrations, the difficulty of processing grief, up to the point of recognizing his own numbness, even in the face of such enormous pain, in the liberating, self-aware cry “I should be more sad”. The grief also surfaces on 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, unexpected pop-culture references, at times barely audible: the words are often swallowed up by the sound the band produces. All of it grafted onto an uncontrolled stream of consciousness, springing from the frontman's own nightmares. On "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 on traditional instruments, a kind of futuristic krautrock, a "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco pushed to its most extreme extent. The ten tracks are tormented, brutal, unsettling, steeped in a constant sense of disorientation, an off-putting anti-pop that at times turns into relentless dance music, as exemplified perfectly during the course of "Giraffe", which suddenly changes direction thanks to a deft tempo shift that transforms the whole thing into an out-and-out rave party.

These are among the few cathartic moments amid tons of tension pushed to the brink of the unbearable. "Pugnello" could be seen as a form of post-modern dadaism centered on the most intimate traumas, a radical project perfectly in keeping with everything the Irish band has recorded so far. On "Alogia", a clinical term denoting the poverty of language that affects people with mental disorders, Kiely confronts his schizophrenia diagnosis head-on with unsettling lucidity; amid the chaotic, anguished din of “The Megazord”, amid the atonal screeching of “Computer Sadness”, in the maddening ticking of "Three Hands Clapping", it feels as though you're in the presence of a faulty sound signal. The band always moves in unison, like a cannonball fired against a stone wall, a bomb packed with vertigo, anguish, hostility, nausea, rendered through layers of sound that generate chaos, blurring any reasonable boundary between post-punk, industrial-noise, no-wave and techno music.
In the four years since the release of the previous “Most Normal“, every member of Gilla Band has pursued other artistic endeavors: Kiely has nurtured a passion for painting, Faulkner has played drums for fellow Irishmen Lankum, Fox has specialized in production, 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 rig of effects pedals and a voice as sincere and effective as this one. At least 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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01/10/2026