Gilla Band on Most Normal
Gilla Band talk about their 'experimental' and 'off the wall' new album Most Normal, their first since changing their name from Girl Band
Within the first few seconds of Gilla Band’s third album, listeners are thrown into panic. Opening track The Gum begins with eardrum-scraping guitar feedback, followed quickly by the clattering, industrial churn of what sounds like a prototype of a primitive robot stirring into life. It is incendiary, and the perfect introduction back into the Dublin band’s world. For all 35 minutes of Most Normal, the intensity, the strangeness and the joyful absurdism of their music never relents once.
“I totally wouldn’t describe it as particularly accessible,” quips the band’s producer and bassist Daniel Fox. “In fact, it’s nuts. There are some bits that are genuinely experimental and off the wall. But we listen to stuff that’s way more leftfield than what we do, and we still think, ‘oh, that’s a great tune’. It’s hard to tell where anybody’s barometer is.”
The irony is that Most Normal might even be their most digestible record so far. The first release since the quartet changed their name from Girl Band in 2021, it does include tracks with identifiable hooks and familiar structures. Eight Fivers has a clear linear format, for example, with Dara Kiely’s vocals front and centre, singing about the list of places he goes hunting for 'shit clothes', while I Was Away is almost hummable, with a repeating guitar riff and a borderline-singalong chorus.
What sets Most Normal apart from its predecessors is that this time around, the maverick touch that they have always applied to their songcraft is now extended to the recording and production process itself. “For this one, we wanted to refine it and make things very direct, as opposed to [2019’s] The Talkies, which is very indirect and is more of a washy head-trip,” says Fox. This newfound desire for sonic tampering, accentuated by the endless free time offered up by pandemic lockdowns, results in a final record that is both tighter in discipline and more focused in execution.
That is not to underestimate the sheer otherworldliness of the music. What Fox describes as “those heavy-handed, fucking-the-whole-track-for-a-couple-of-seconds, really hard left-hand turns” that are the Gilla Band trademark are writ large across every track on the album; Gilla Band dare you to relax while listening to their music. For inspiration in that regard, the band looked towards contemporary hip-hop as a guiding light. “Earl Sweatshirt is a good example,” says Fox. “The whole track gets mangled for a few seconds and it’s this head-trip. For our arrangements, we were into stuff like that. You don’t hear that kind of thing in rock bands too much. We were definitely pulling from some of that.”
Elsewhere, the band dipped much further into history for ideas. The track Capgras, for example, which finds Kiely issue a stream of consciousness spoken word diatribe over scuzzy, processed white noise, was inspired by Kiely’s interest in the 1950s American country singer Ray Price’s penchant for metatextually narrating his own songs. Indeed, it often feels like Kiely is a step or two removed from his own lyrics, adding a further layer of arch, situationist absurdity to an already surreal mix.
On Binliner Fashion, Kiely sings, ‘Full from swallowing a filling / Pritt Stick all my teeth back in / I’ll still be happy, but I might be gappy / Watching the pot boil and wearing tin foil’. It is typical of the self-deprecating, deadpan nature of Kiely’s writing, although to ask him about it is to ask for trouble.
“There’s a hint of love songs in there somewhere, I think there is a bit of sincerity to it,” Kiely contends, barely suppressing a cheeky smirk. “It’s weird,” he continues, starting to make a bit more sense. “I just go on about mundane shit and then make it a bit weirder.”
Having now been together for over a decade, Gilla Band can be considered one of the elder statesmen of the now booming Irish guitar music scene. Many of the newest emerging groups, including Naked Lungs and Silverbacks, now turn to Fox when looking for a producer. It is a highly fertile and interconnected network of young musicians, something that the band love to see.
“Compared to when we were younger, people are more confident in themselves in terms of getting out of Ireland,” says Fox. “I think there’s always been the same amount of music, but I think people feel like it’s more accessible to tour and spread the word. Traditionally a lot of Irish bands would have to move to England, and not everyone wants to do that. But Dublin is a hard place to live in terms of the economy and trying to find housing, so I think people have plenty to shout about. And they do.”
With groups like Gilla Band leading the way, the future of Irish music is in pleasingly daring and dangerous hands.
Gilla Band release Most Normal on 7 Oct via Rough Trade