The metal front door to the Dublin complex where Gilla Band keep their studio slams with such shocking force it could snap your fingers clean off. Behind it lies at least one possible explanation for the Irish band’s mutant swarm of noise. “If you’re here on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, the whole building is thundering,” says drummer Adam Faulkner.
Amid the metal drummers and diabolical wedding singers, “the trick,” says wry bassist Daniel Fox, “is to be louder than everyone else.”
On the last Sunday in May, the ceiling of their cluttered studio is only lightly pulsing. And really, Gilla Band do anything but make noise for noise’s sake. The four-piece band acts like alchemists, exploiting instruments to their full potential. Whether the black steel guitar hanging on the wall or the Roland TR-909 behind Fox, it’s all just another sound to pickle in their trademark combination of power and precision. When Dry Cleaning were working on their latest album, Secret Love, they went to Fox and guitarist Alan Duggan Borges in search of a little “poison.” Gilla Band’s sound, says DC guitarist Tom Dowse, is less about impact than an atmosphere that “exists somewhere thrilling, unhinged, abstract, unknowable, humorous and beautiful, as opposed to just the pure catharsis of volume.”
Still, Gilla Band’s four members, all 34 or 35, seem surprised when I say how intense I found their new album, Pugnello. This is the kind of record that makes you feel like Godzilla, 100 meters tall. In their windowless submarine of an HQ, hemmed in by pedals and machines, it’s easy to forget to come up for air. “I suppose I don’t realize how weird it is,” says their gentle frontman Dara Kiely. Perhaps their sensibilities are skewed: He recalls being at a party around 2011 and playing a song by no-wave sax player James Chance. “It was like the EastEnders silence when there’s a fight in the pub,” he says, referencing the conflict-prone British soap. “Like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ Somebody put ‘Use Somebody’ by Kings of Leon on and I had to leave…”
“It’s regularly like, it should feel this uncomfortable, or it should feel this intense,” says Duggan Borges, a debonair figure who also manages the band. “We’re not kidding ourselves. It’s not like, ‘It needs a middle eight.’” Crammed on seats next to their live setup, the band laughs. Overhead, the Medieval Times flag from their previous Pitchfork interview is stuck in a rafter. (Do they know Ed Sheeran? They’ll never tell.)
It took Gilla Band four years to make Pugnello; you can see how they might have gotten acclimated to their brutal squall during that time. Unlike 2022’s sublime Most Normal, which was inspired by Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs and the idea of making an album that flowed like a dream, there was no concept. As soon as they submitted Most Normal to their label, Rough Trade, they started divining for what might come next. “It was very much like someone had opened all the doors of the producer’s room—like, OK, we can go anywhere,” says Faulkner, their cheeriest member. They quickly tilted towards bangers.
The band recorded Most Normal during the pandemic, leaving them worried about how they’d play it live. They pulled it off—then quit worrying about how to translate their ideas from the studio to a show. For Pugnello, it’s Faulkner behind the kit who will shoulder the heaviest load. The album opens with “The Angelus,” which has a berserk jungle-inspired 170bpm rhythm played on a drumkit comprised of five snares: one brass, a big ’70s birch number, a tiny maple one, a “funny-sized” ’50s thing, and an old marching drum with legs and a dampener to give it “a big ’80s power ballad” sound. The tempo and setup kind of defy time.
