Madra Salach @ McChuills, Glasgow, 18 Mar

Madra Salach had released just one single by the time they sold out all seven dates on their first UK headline tour. Led by enigmatic frontman Paul Banks, clips of the the Dublin six-piece breathing new life into traditional Irish ballads have gone viral several times over, meaning tickets for this gig at McChuills were long gone by the time their debut EP, It’s a Hell of an Age, was released in January.

Proceedings get underway with Tanzana, a local five-piece alt-rock band whom the crowd are lucky to see, given they sold out the very same venue in their own right this time last year. Though the already-excited audience needs little warming up, the gothic quintet do an excellent job of reverberating away any cobwebs that may still be lingering from St Patrick’s Day celebrations the night before.

There's a quick turnaround before Madra Salach take the stage and Banks staggers up to the microphone, opening with Blue & Gold, the group’s eerie debut on which Banks speaks of an addiction to scratchcards over an atmospheric trad backing. It's a fitting demonstration of the way the group fuse the sound of the past with themes of the modern Irish experience. While trad groups of a previous generation may have taken this opportunity to indulge in a Guinness or two, there’s a steely determination in the eyes of Banks, who looks deadset on getting things right in the group’s first headline gig in Scotland, pausing only occasionally to take swigs from a Heineken 0.0.

Image: Madra Salach @ McChuills, Glasgow, 18 Mar by Elliiot Hetherton

A fervent rendition of the historical ballad Spancil Hill follows, and it feels rather surreal to watch the crowd, many of whom were definitely born after the turning of the millennium, chant the words back to the band as if the song was written in 2025 and not the 1870s. Spirits are high and tempting though it must be for the band to keep the tempo up all evening, Banks and the gang aren’t afraid to slow things down and talk about the often dark history associated with so many of their covers. "This one was written by one of your own," says Banks of Ewan MacColl’s The Tunnel Tigers, a song he dedicates to the Irish men who died constructing London’s transport infrastructure.

The frontman is met with confused silence and a cry of “Shitehole!” when he asks how far we are from Blantyre, before immediately leaving the heckler feeling guilty when he explains that the next number is about the Blantyre disaster, which took the lives of over 200 miners. “Maybe you’ll stop being so harsh on Blantyre now!” laughs Banks after a stunning rendition of Christy Moore’s The Blantyre Explosion.

The 19th century covers are put on hold for a surprisingly effective rendition of Neutral Milk Hotel’s modern indie classic, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and the hour-long set closes with a triple header of original material in The Ribbon Factory, I Was Just a Boy and rousing closer, The Man Who Seeks Pleasure. The latter feels like the clear standout from the group’s own material, with one young fan in the second row declaring that it “might be the best day of (his) life,” as Banks cries out over the drone of Maxime Arnold's harmonium.

Madra Salach will undoubtedly draw comparison to both Fontaines D.C. and The Mary Wallopers, thanks to their trendy style and commitment to keeping Ireland’s ballads alive respectively, but the volume of character and originality the band cram into a short set reveals that they're already well on course to carving out their own space in Ireland’s music scene. How their original music will develop down the line only time will tell, but it feels as though there was a mutual understanding among the lucky few fortunate enough to snag a ticket in the East End pub this evening that the chances of getting to see Madra Salach in such an intimate setting again are slim.