Gilla Band guitarist Al Duggan is unpicking the loose concept behind the Irish group’s third album, Most Normal. Their first, 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, ended with frontman Dara Kiely screaming. Their second, 2019’s The Talkies, “opened with him having a panic attack and ended with him breathing calmly”, he explains. “If there’s a linear progression happening through these records, this next record should feel like you’re wandering through a dreamscape.” But for all his talk of reading up on “dream cycles and circadian rhythms”, Most Normal’s vibe is closer to nightmare, its wilful rollercoaster of noise strafing listeners with distortion as Kiely pinballs between surrealist gabble and desperate, paint-stripping howls.
This turbulent masterpiece is the work of musicians committed to the creative possibilities within discomfiting sounds. They weren’t always this way: in their teens, three-quarters of Gilla Band were members of Dublin indie rockers Harrows. “We were really terrible,” says Duggan. “Arctic Monkeys had a real fucking chokehold over our generation.” Nevertheless, Duggan says there was “some interest from Sony Ireland. We thought we were gonna be massive.” He grins: “Thank God nothing happened.”
