Features - Interviews

Tight Unit, Closer Friends: An Interview With Search Results

Since featuring them as an Inbound artist late last year, Search Results have smitten many more listeners with their masterfully mercurial indie-rock craft

Ahead of what’s set to be a packed few months, Danny Kilmartin chats to Dublin trio – guitarist Fionn Brennan, drummer Jack Condon and bassist Adam Hoban – about the road less travelled they have taken to their upcoming second LP

Photos by Monika Ruman

What’s in a name – why Search Results?

Jack: We lost a bet with Shane Clifford.

You started writing together very quickly after first meeting. What was it that brought you together in the first place?

Myself and Fionn got together to help finish each other’s songs, because we were both pretty new to writing songs. Turning it into a band, with Adam involved by this point, was just to do a one off performance but ended up working well enough that we kept it going.

You all moved to Dublin just before the onset of Covid-19 from Sligo, Waterford and Tipperary. What can you tell us about the music scenes back home?

(in unison) Terrible.

Why the move?

We all moved to Dublin for college in 2019, where we all met and became friends pretty soon after moving.

Would you say that Covid brought you closer together?

It gave us more time to work harder on writing together and working on the live set for when restrictions were lifted. We recorded the first EP in the houses we lived in at the time, and by the time we recorded the second EP we were all living together. That definitely helped us become a tighter unit and above all, closer friends.

You made the decision early on to trade instruments. How has this worked to your benefit?

We’ve all had very few, if any, lessons in the instruments we currently play in the band. I feel like that had allowed us to create parts that are fun and interesting to us at least.

Information Blip has a certain bedroom charm about it. How did you achieve this sound?

Darragh Hansard is a big part of that. He understood where we were coming from with the previous EPs and was able to take the lo-fi sound we were creating, and elevate it

You’ve mentioned before that you like to play new songs live as soon as they’ve been rehearsed once or twice. How was crowd reaction shaped your music?

Crowd reaction doesn’t generally have much to do with the shaping of the songs. It’s more a matter of fleshing out bits we find interesting. One thing that the crowd helps with is scrapping songs that died on stage and finding out which ones to play more often.

What can you tell us about the “keep it:bin it” approach from adopting this model?

Generally we’ll keep the stuff that we find funny or fun to play. Things that get scrapped tend to be things that sound like we’re trying to be something we’re not, or sections and parts that exist just for the sake of it and essentially waste time.

How would you describe your music to those who haven’t heard it?

For fans of Andrew Dice Clay, Ray Wise, Diamanda Galas, Mel Blanc, The Beatles and EJ Menswear.

With the album now under your belts, what’s next?

We’re currently working towards the second album, which at the moment is sounding to us like a more concise version of the sounds and themes we explored on Information Blip.

Follow Search Results on the least Godforsaken of the Big Four

is a Dublin-based writer, contributing to the likes of HeadStuff, Eject and Goldenplec