Gilla Band
In the Meadows, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin
★★★☆☆
A bulldozing onslaught of pure noise marks the start of Gilla Band’s tumultuous set at the In the Meadows festival, at Dublin’s Royal Hospital Kilmainham, on Saturday.
Fully justifying their reputation as one of Ireland’s most uncompromising bands, they give a performance that’s a mix of short, sharp shocks and longer, bludgeoning interludes. It’s like listening to the end of the world as relayed via the medium of early-1980s postpunk.
Without being hyperbolic, there is a case that the group (who previously went as Girl Band) are a sort of Velvet Underground of 21st-century Irish indie music. They aren’t stars in their own right, but their impact can be heard all over.
Fontaines DC – off headlining Barcelona’s Primavera Festival as Gilla Band take to the stage in Dublin – have named them as an influence. The Idles’ Irish-born guitarist, Mark Bowen, has identified Gilla Band as one of the driving forces in the surge of new rock in Ireland in recent years. “They made something that was completely new. When you listen to the first album, I don’t think I’ve heard a band that sounds like this before,” he told The Irish Times in 2024. “They’ve spawned the idea that you don’t need to rely on UK or American culture to inform our culture.”
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Such praise is worn lightly by Gilla Band, whose third album, Great Acclaim, was released in 2022 on London’s Rough Trade – the label that championed The Smiths and, more recently, the Mercury-nominated Irish trad band Lankum.
Wearing a rumpled jacket and shirt, the band’s singer, Dara Kiely, looks like a civil servant who’s arrived at the gig straight from back-to-back Zoom calls. His banter is limited to the occasional “Hello”. Under stark red-and-blue lighting, he and the rest of the band perform without swagger or showmanship as they begin with Backwash, which starts off sounding like the postpunk stalwarts The Fall and ends up resembling the soundtrack to an alien invasion.
Gilla Band have a murky prehistory as an Arctic Monkeys-style collective of guitar urchins called Harrows. Correctly concluding that Ireland didn’t need another so-so indie band, they went from the next potential Picture This to a portrait of the musical apocalypse, influenced more by Francis Bacon then Franz Ferdinand.
Real darkness is threaded through the pummeling. Kiely has talked about issues around anxiety. The group’s second album, The Talkies, from 2019, began with a recording of the singer breathing through a panic attack (foreshadowing the Fontaines DC single Starburster, which explores the same subject). The sheer howling intensity of it all means their music isn’t for everyone – or perhaps even most people. At In the Meadows it has the quality of nerve-shredding Marmite as Kiely uncorks his lacerating wit on Post Ryan (“In recovery/ I’m in recovery/ I’m just the same prick”).
They conclude with the funny and terrifying Eight Fivers, where nightmarish lyrics accompany a Stygian avalanche of guitar. “I spent all my money on shit clothes, shit clothes,” Kiely howls. “Didn’t get ’em from Wicklow/ Didn’t get ’em from Arklow.”
It’s thrillingly, brutally uncompromising. Stepping out of the festival tent into the cool, calm evening daylight, you get a sense of a storm having passed – that the listener has completed a sort of indie-rock Stations of the Cross.
