Gilla Band have attracted some impressive plaudits since announcing their fourth album this summer. A feature in Pitchfork heralding its arrival described them as “Ireland’s most influential band since My Bloody Valentine”. Should any readers feel this was a classic example of music journalism hyperbole, it was followed up with a succession of quotes from the Dublin quartet’s musical peers, all eager to attest to their importance, originality and impact.
One of them, Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez – one half of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls – went so far as to say precisely the kind of thing about Gilla Band that people said about My Bloody Valentine 35 years ago: “They basically reinvented guitar music.” Under the circumstances, there’s something faintly disappointing about the fact that Pugnello opens with a very prosaic and familiar sound indeed: that of someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar. But then something disconcertingly odd happens. The power chord doesn’t fade away.
It just … keeps going, for the best part of two and half minutes. That grinding drone underpins a track called The Angelus, punctuated by frantic bursts of warp-speed rhythm that would sound like drum’n’bass breakbeats were it not for the fact that they appear to be played live on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares. The drone is eventually replaced by a series of ferocious, shuddering bass explosions, overlaid with a sound that could, theoretically, be feedback, but most evokes a dial-up modem.
Throughout, frontman Dara Kiely keeps up a torrent of spoken-word vocals. Sometimes he seems utterly anguished, his voice a raw-throated scream. At other points, he appears to reference the theme tune of the old cartoon Top Cat – “his close friends get to call him TC” – and the kids’ TV show Bananas in Pyjamas.
The sense of WTF? is overwhelming. Indeed, the sense of WTF? doesn’t abate until Pugnello finally draws to a close 42 minutes later. In the interim, the listener is confronted with the kind of music that leaves you casting about for something to compare it to and coming up with only the vaguest suggestions – not a regular occurrence when dealing with alternative rock in 2026, which tends to wear its influences very much on its sleeve.
You can see why people keep mentioning My Bloody Valentine in relation to Gilla Band – the contents of Pugnello certainly invoke the jarring, exhilarating experience of hearing Loveless or the Tremolo EP in 1991, and boggling at the idea that it’s actually supposed to sound like that. Gilla Band’s is a resolutely contemporary sound, glitching and juddering like a faulty signal, less interested in melody than it is in texture. There’s nothing in the way of a hummable tune: Pugnello’s power comes from the way it drags the listener headlong through sudden shifts in tone and volume, as when the weird electronically treated vocals of At the Gallop are shelled by eruptions of noise, or when Computer Sadness’s racing heartbeat pulse is disrupted by blasts of atonal guitar.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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