• Video Premiere: Any Joy – Sun

    February 1, 2021 - By 

    The Sun EP, which may have slipped you by at the end of last year, saw Any Joy chip further away at their singular heady brew of psychedelia, internalised doom and post-punk to follow up on their wonderful 2017 debut album, Cycles. The band have shared with us their Adam Curtis fever dream of a video for its title track, created by frontman Oisin Dineen. He tells us “Climate disaster and human displacement are the happy subject matter of Sun. The video paints a colourful, post apocalyptic landscape, running down the clock.” Check it out:

  • “Is There Ever NOT More To Say About the Institutional Oppression of Women?” – M(h)aol Release First Single in 5 Years

    October 5, 2020 - By 

    Having releasing one single (‘Clementine‘ – featuring guest vocals from none other than Dara Kiely) in 2015, laying out a pointed intersection feminist & animal welfare-centred manifesto across their raw, visceral 15-minute sets, fast becoming one of the most talked-about bands in Dublin – their bassist the titular Jamie on Girl Band’s debut album – before inexplicably withdrawing with the same unpredictable energy they rode in with, M(h)aol, are the stuff of punk legend. As you well know, the intervening years in a post-referendum and post-Girl Band Irish landscape have seen a seismic transformation – with peak post-punk dude fecundity. Things were supposed to improve. Women were to experience something resembling equal representation on every…

  • EP Premiere: Licehead – Friends

    May 19, 2020 - By 

    Paul O’Connor – of That Snaake notoriety – has shared with us his latest release under the Licehead banner, which follows up on last year’s Music For Normal People album, and precedes upcoming summer LP Perfect Death Forever, which is set in a modern Ireland and based around a reincarnated lung’s attempts to kill its host. An aural equivalent to peeling-paint walls-closing-in claustrophobic hysteria, Friends at its extremes recalls the torpid squalor of Fat White Family or The Fall in dada-techno mode. Partly written over the last two months, the EP sees O’Connor turns the pen upon himself and loved ones, and societally-ingrained truths; title track ‘fRENDS’ is itself a reworking of ‘I’ll Be There For You’,…

  • Premiere: Ghost Office – The Face of Garbo

    March 19, 2020 - By 

    Arguably Belfast’s finest post-punk pragmatists, Ghost Office are back with ‘The Face of Garbo’, the second single from their forthcoming debut album, set for release later this summer. Marrying propulsive – near King Gizzard-esque – psych-flecked chaos with a macro-anthology narrative of fables spanning across time & disciplines, it’s one of their most artistically complete works thus far. The single was produced by bassist Carl Small, with lyrical duties from guitarist/shared vocalist Joe Gilson, who tells us more: “The song tells three stories, of events that cast their makers into myth. The solar eclipse that proved Albert Einstein’s law of relativity, the opera singer Enrico Caruso being threatened…

  • Premiere: Ghost Office – Cereal Café

    December 5, 2019 - By 

    Belfast post-punk trio Ghost Office are set to release their effervescent, jerking new single ‘Cereal Café’ tomorrow, December 6th. Their first release since 2018’s excellent ‘Here Come The Elders!‘, it was written in a half hour frenzy, voicing, through Stewart Lee-tinged wordplay, drummer/vocalist Richard Bailie’s dismay at realising, finally, “that they have opened a cereal cafe in London, selling all the milks.” Almond milk, regular milk, and so on. ‘Cereal Café’ is their “grand anti-gentrification anthem”. “Listeners will perhaps question whether they are several years too late, especially considering the flagrant gentrification of the Ormeau Road area of Belfast [“Catch it,before the gentrifiers come“, as the Guardian recently, tardily ordered],…

  • Stream: His Father’s Voice – In The Shade

    October 14, 2019 - By 

    Staking their claim as one of the brightest prospects in Irish post-punk & shoegaze with their Context & Perspective EP earlier this year, Limerick’s His Father’s Voice are back with a new single. Written around the same time as their debut EP, the quartet’s A-side goes further down the path trodden down fellow ‘gaze revivalists like DIIV & Cheatahs, without letting the wall of sound envelope what it is – a great pop song that plays on the idea of “how resentment finds room to feed and grow through hiding behind the appearance of a bright and happy exterior”. Meanwhile, B-side ‘Close’ is the kind of miasmic sea of…

  • UK Post-Punk Duo JOHN Set For Irish Tour

    August 15, 2019 - By 

    Raw UK garage-punk duo JOHN are set to make their first appearance in Ireland later this year, accompanying the release of their second album, Out Here On The Fringes, set for release on October 4. This run of shows comes at the end of a lengthy spell in France & the UK, following an eleven-country spell in 2018 with Idles. Taking place in conjunction with some of our favourite venues, artists & promoters (Why. Gigs & Drone Mansions) – their three-date run is as follows: Friday, November 29 // Bennigans Bar, Derry w/His Father’s Voice & SHŌTO Saturday, November 30 // The 343, Belfast w/Problem Patterns and Wake House Sunday, December 1 // The Sound…

  • Video Premiere: Van Panther – The Cutters

    August 14, 2019 - By 

    With each act imprinting its own singular identity with the backing of a supportive community operating completely in tandem, we’ve already waxed lyrical on how the fecund Limerick music scene is Ireland’s musical petri dish. Van Panther are one such act, marrying technicolour pop immediacy with jagged post-punk revivalism. New single ‘The Cutters’ is as tight-knit and pristinely crafted without losing the warm, lo-fi charm of its predecessors, and is taken from forthcoming EP Overcast, following up on 2016’s Café van Hemel and 2017’s Hark! The EP was played by, recorded & produced by band founder Kieran Ralph. “Musically, the song is basically a look at the meld between guitar-based music and…

  • Video Premiere: Grave Goods – Source

    May 16, 2019 - By 

    Ahead of only their third show to date, supporting Beak> this Saturday, May 18 at Whelan’s, tri-city post-punk trio Grave Goods have kindly given us a first recorded glimpse of their visceral power. ‘Source’ is the first release from a session filmed by experimental filmmaking platform IMPATV, which records & broadcasts the heavier side of DIY, experimental & underground culture. Featuring members of Pins, Girls Names and September Girls, ‘Source’ forgoes the brooding atmospheres & jangle of the aforementioned in favour of primal urgency. More than delivering on the promise of its constituent parts, Sarah Grimes & Phil Quinn’s Girl Band-recalling rhythmic syncopation lay claustrophobic, anxious loops between which Lois MacDonald’s buzzsaw guitar finds voids to…

  • Video Premiere: Shrug Life – 2009

    May 13, 2019 - By 

    One of the finest cuts from last year’s A Litany of Failures Vol. II independent compilation was Shrug Life‘s ‘2009’, a misleadingly uptempo ditty that mined reprieve from the jowls of self-imposed doom. Matter-of-factly delivered, Danny Carroll addresses the effect of the too-often underexamined (by musicians) abuse of bad hash as a crutch in times of mental ill-health: “Days previous I felt like a genius; sleepless, but safe in my cure for cancer, awake for six nights, working on the answer.” Of the track, Carroll said: “‘2009′ is an awkwardly accurate description of where I found myself in my late adolescence – suffering from sleep-deprived psychosis, perpetually…