Gilla Band (IE)

About

Also known as: Girl Band

Gilla Band make the kind of noise that gets under your skin and stays there. The Dublin four piece, built around vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan, bassist Daniel Fox, and drummer Adam Faulkner, deal in post punk and noise rock with a genuinely unsettling edge. Rolling Stone put it well, describing their sound as something "recorded in a meat locker under a fallout shelter", and comparing them to Liars and Nick Cave's Birthday Party. Their 2015 debut album Holding Hands with Jamie earned serious critical attention, and The Irish Times called them "the most fascinating act out of these parts at present". Their 2019 follow up The Talkies pushed things further, pulling in techno and industrial textures alongside effects drenched guitars and Kiely's abstract, stream of consciousness lyrics. The band released Most Normal in 2022, their first record under the Gilla Band name after dropping the Girl Band moniker for being, in their own words, a "misgendered name" that risked "propagating a culture of non inclusivity". Influences they actually claim include Bad Brains, James Chance and the Contortions, Neu!, and The Chemical Brothers, which tells you something about how wide and strange their sonic palette really is.