Gilla Band on New Name, ‘Most Normal,’ and Mental Health – Esquire

It only takes 30 seconds. Just a half-minute into Gilla Bands Most Normalthe chaotic Irish noisemaker's brand new and brightest, relatively speaking, LP to dateon opening track The Gum, you know that the quartet has lost none of the ferociousness that established it, making them one of the most thrilling bands of its generation. In fact, The Gum is such a little studio-concocted handful that as the group known until last year as Girl Band prepares to head out on a European tour, its proving to be one of the more challenging to pull off live. It was written in kind of a haphazard way, says bassist, engineer, and preeminent Gilla Band jokester Daniel Fox, with a laugh. All the measures of everything are very unintuitive, and its just a really jerky kind of song. Getting the sounds isnt too hard, but then stitching it all together is challenging. And weve had to come up with some clever ways of being able to some of the effects and things live.

Post-punk, indie rock, art rock, post-Goth, and most frequently, noise rock: all those genre names have been affixed to Gilla Band, but they all struggle to do justice to the sound of this singular outfit. On their first EP, 2012s France 98, released under that previous band name, they toyed with a more traditional chord-driven indie-garage sound. But Gilla Band found its footing by forging a bolder, left-leaning template on the breakout 2014 single Lawman, a ferocious cover of Blawans Why They Hide The Bodies Under My Garage?, and their electrifying 2015 debut album Holding Hands With Jamie. They melded pummeling rhythms, hypnotic grooves, buzzsaw guitars, and all manner of magnificently abrasive sounds and effects with a singer-reciter-shouter-screamer like no other. It was sensational, and they built on the feat again four years later with The Talkies, a denser and more claustrophobic second full-length.

I have now been lucky enough to interview Gilla Band for each of their albums. The day we speak, over Zoom, its three-quarters of the group: Fox, guitarist Adam Duggan, and front man/vocal force of nature Dara Kiely, all in great spirits and eager to discuss Most Normal. (I would later email with drummer Adam Faulkner.) Theres one word they all come back to in contrasting the new album with its predecessors. We wanted the record to be really direct in its sound, says Fox. Part of that directness came from writing and recording in the more intimate confines of their rehearsal spacethe very room from which Duggan is Zooming inand Sonic Studios in central Dublin, where Fox works as an engineer.

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Most Normal was written and recorded in 2020 and 2021. And you know what that means. For the Dubliners, the early months of Covid lockdown meant about a million Zoom meetings, recalls Fox. It was really just an excuse to hang out and have a couple cans. And wed talk about music, but really vague, more talking musical ideas as opposed to concrete ones. One of those early ideas was to make a record contextualized in dreams, something that, once the lads finally were able to meet in person, didnt really come to fruition, though Kiely says he manifested something of a dream state on Backwash a driving banger replete with Kielys trademark wordplayhis deftness with rhyming couplets, or just seemingly free-association references is one of Gilla Bands signatures. Kiely is nothing if not a wordsmith, even when venturing into the goofy. The title Most Normalan excerpt from a lyric in the track I Was Awaymight seem a strange one for a band that is anything but conventional in its sounds or experimental impulses, but, as Kiely says, it was the best of a bad bunch. It was kind of getting close to the deadline, he recalls.

And while the band didnt impose any parameters on the new album as they did with The Talkies, on which they wrote all songs in the key of A and Kiely completely avoided pronouns in all of his lyrics, the pandemic allowed them the time to be more exploratory than ever. Duggan adds that there are plenty of new sounds and textures throughout the LP. We used this self-oscillating noise synth box, and its all over the record, he explains. Theres a lap steel on lots of tracks, theres organs, stuff like that. And then there was little production-y things, like at the start of The Weirds, on Gushie or Pratfallthey all have this like sidechain going on, where it all sort of sucks into the kick.

Gilla Band has had no shortage of challenges in its history, due in part to Kielys struggles with mental health. In the press run before Jamies 2015 releaseincluding in an interview with me for Live Nation TVhe was remarkably, refreshingly candid about a dark psychotic break hed had in which he imagined himself a god. (His encounter with a therapist is memorably, mind-blowingly recounted in the song The Last Riddler.) If that sort of opennessat once discomforting and darkly funnyis more commonplace now, even among male musicians, it wasnt then, and certainly, Kiely says, not within his family, though he adds that they have come a long way since. But riding high on the acclaim of their debut, Gilla Band had to cut short its 2015 tour in the interest of his wellness. There was another similarly truncated tour in 2017, which left the guys, by 2018, if not back at square one then certainly without much of the momentum theyd recently built. All of which, of course, paled in importance to the well-being of a friend and bandmate. But Gilla Band was something of a blank slate with an unknown future when they set about working on The Talkies, a record whose opening track Prolix, meant to record Kielys breathing exercises, a part of his practice of mindfulness meditation, ended up capturing a real-time panic attack. The group wisely supported The Talkies gingerly, with only limited live shows. One bright spot? They could get started on a third album sooner. Then of course, Covid happened. So, yeah: challenges. You cant win.

From left: lan Duggan, Adam Faulkner, Dara Kiely, and Daniel Fox.

Or can you? Time can be a healer, and in the case of a band that labors over its songwriting, make for an even more interesting LP. Gilla Band say they are blessed to have in Rough Trade and its founder Geoff Travis, a longtime champion of the band, a label that doesnt sweat them about meeting a deadline. A couple of things immediately stand out about Most Normal. Only one song, centerpiece The Weirds, is longer than five minutesthis from a band known for routinely sailing past that time mark. While they say that wasnt deliberate, its noticeable, as is a more lighthearted touch. On summer single Eight Fiver, Kiely, in very Kiely fashion, rails about spending all my money on shit clothes, rattling off a string of shop names that most Americans might have to Google, with the exception of JCs where he got my bootcut jeans. Im very grateful for a lot of things in my life, Kiely explains. But Ive never thought I looked cool dress-sense wise. And Ive been asked a few times, So what are you shittiest clothes? and um, there was a time whenmy brother was older than me by like ten years. And hes also shorter than me. So I inherited all of his clothes. There would be like, flared jeans that hit my shin, or like a t-shirt that had like a dog on it, just stupid crap. So Ive never really been confident in that way, and I thought it would be interesting to try and do that in a track.

Self-deprecation, thy name is Dara Kiely. For years, knocking himself about his looks, style, hair, weight, confidence, you name it, has been his lyrical muse, though its done in such a wry and witty way that you cant help but chuckle. There was the matter of erectile dysfunction in early single Da Bom Bom, and fan favorite Pears For Lunch immortalized the line I look crap with my top off. On Most Normal its the clothes. Binliner Fashion, a song that ends up in a near primal scream while Duggan wires out and Faulkner rides the snare and hi-hat, actually begins with Kiely musing on dressing in plastic bags and not being able to wear hats. There are dentistry troubles, haircut slags, and a verse on giving up on general hygiene, financial savings, and exercising. He is relentlessly hard on himself, and his self-image was done no favors, he says, by Covid quarantine. I can really go into my head a lot and think about things and take it out on myself, he admits. A lot of it was written when I was in lockdown, and I also turned 30 during then. I just kind of reflected on my life, cause I had a lot of time to think. To be clear, this is a very good-looking guy, who could probably pass for a cousin of Ronan Farrow. But he was hardly a natural born front man. As a kid he was painfully shy, the type to go red in a second and get made fun of for it. Eventually he came out of his shell, but, as he says, pandemic isolation had him fold back inwards. Im kind of creeping out of that now, he adds. He still feels like hes not much of a pure singer, but thats almost beside the pointbetween a droll and deadpan spoken register; a shout tinged with just enough angst; a lilting falsetto thats used sparingly but effectively; and a full-bore scream that could peel the paint off a venues walls, its one of the most extraordinary vocal arsenals I know of, in any genre.

Kielys also found it in himself to be more open than ever on one track. Nowhere on Most Normal does he excel more than on closer Post Ryan, which must be given its own shout-out. It was a tough song to finish, says Fox, one they might not have even been able to complete earlier in the bands history. The song is an electro-stomper, with an infectious beat taken from the old A Flock of Seagulls chestnut I Ran, overlaid with an insistent self-oscillator buzz, Duggan grinding and chiming on guitar, and Kiely, with the most warts-and-all honest lyric hes ever written, less about bad haircuts than actual feelings. Im in between breakdowns / Im constantly in recovery he flatly states. Took it all for granted / Gonna end up homeless.

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Theres also tough assessment of his penchant for witty, non-sequitur lyrics: I hid behind the surreal / Im a bit too much? A bit too much for who? I ask. Im just not that comfortable sometimes, he says. So thats why the lyrics were actually difficult, not really to write, but to actually show the guys. And later in the song more musical insecurities creep in: I couldnt sing for shit, so I shout about crisps / And I never take risks. And maybe most wrenching: Ive never been an asset. From an outsiders perspective, such confessions are nothing short of heartbreaking.

But to his mates? The ones who know him best? Theyre actually able to see lightness in the lyrics. That Ive never been an asset line, says Fox. I thought he was saying Ive never been on acid! Likewise, Duggan said he saw humor in much of it, like the crisps line, and one in which Dara evokes his band nickname Safety Thumbsbestowed on him after the guys once saw him bracing himself with his thumbs in a car in LA.that was only going about 45 miles an hour. (Im a very safe guy! laughs Kiely.) I did find a lot of them funny, says Duggan. But heartbreaking as well. Theyre my favorite lyrics on the album, but we just asked him, Are you comfortable with doing this? Disarmingly honest, Faulkner calls them. Quite incredible and revealing. And says Fox: It takes a lot of guts to go out and do that in from of x amount of people. You know, everyone can think negatively about themselves. But not all of us could express it in such a public forum.

Aw thanks, guys, says Kiely, only half-jokingly, adding that he is gratified at the response to the song. Its very therapeutic and a cathartic kind of feeling, writing that way. As the band prepares to head out on the road, Kiely knows its likely hell encounter strangers who approach him wanting to talk about their own mental health. Hes okay with it. I did a university course in Dublin, when we were doing The Talkies, in peer support work, in mental health. I worked in a hospital there, a clinic, where you kind of share experiences and stuff like that. So, Im used to talking to people in that kind of mindset, I guess. And it can be a bit intense, having people come up and say all this stuff, or whatever. But its always really positive.

Gilla Band is prepared to head out on the road and, as Kiely (back row, left) says, ready to have some deep chats with fans.

Finally, I cant let the guys go without addressing the uh, Gilla in the room. It was less than a year agoNovember of 2021that the band known for a decade-plus as Girl Band announced that it was changing its name, along with a statement apologizing for choosing a misgendered name in the first place, and to anyone who has been hurt or affected by it. Whether people thought the change was long overdue or utterly unnecessary is irrelevant to the band. The real question has less to do with the decision than its timing. Fox had been asked by Noisey about the band name and its history of use as a dismissive, demeaning term for women in music as far back as 2015, a few months after FADER included Girl Band in a piece on acts with problematic names. But after a while, the probing seemed to fade, The Talkies came out, the band toured, and the world seemed to have moved on. So why the change in 2021? Fox says the critical press wasnt the point. Our reasoning in coming towards the decision to do it was more of a collective personal arrival, he explains. All four of us thought it was the right thing to do. As opposed to a reactionary one, where it was like, Were getting shit, we should do something about this.

As for the new name, Gilla is an Old Irish given name that, Fox says with a laugh, was the result of a few more Covid Zoom meetings. It was a tedious process, he recalls. Because its a weird thing to do, even though were happy to have done it. Like imagine trying to come up with a new name, if you thought, Okay, I dont feel comfortable being John. Its weird to think about something like that! We knew we wanted to keep the initials and the band part of it. Because it was just changing the word, that was the important thing that we wanted to do. It was likeGloop Band? Go-Go Band? Guinness Band?

And now, for how long do they expect to see their new name with fka Girl Band attached? Oh, that will happen for a bit, for sure. It might happen forever, I dont know! says Duggan, while Fox, who seems to have heard quite enough about the topic, is blunter: I dont really care!

John Norris is a veteran music journalist, who began his career as a writer, editor, correspondent and anchor at MTV News. Following MTV, he served as Managing Editor and Host of the music discovery site Noisevox, and as Supervising Producer of News at Fuse. His freelance work includes music and culture writing for Billboard, GQ, The Daily Beast, VICE, SPIN, Pigeons & Planes, VMAN and Lyrical Lemonade, and hosting and writing for Sirius XM, The Recording Academy, South By Southwest, and the Bonnaroo and Sasquatch music festivals.

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Gilla Band on New Name, 'Most Normal,' and Mental Health - Esquire