Gilla Band On New Album, New Gear, And New Mediums

George Ward

Freelance journalist and online editor for CLUNK. Can be found out and about in Bristol, finding cheap records or having a pint on King Street.

With their new album ‘Pugnello’ out on Friday, we chat with Dara and Alan from Dublin’s noise-rock group Gilla Band

‘Pugnello,’ the new album from legendary Dublin noise-rock Gilla Band, is out on Friday 25th September via Rough Trade Records. This will be the first album from Gilla Band since 2022’s ‘Most Normal’ and sees the band crawl deeper into the dark experimentation that has kept them consistently influential, blending noise rock guitars with techno drum machines, wry humour with guttural screams. To break down the album and its conception, we sat down with frontman Dara Kiely and guitarist Alan Duggan-Borges.

Though there’s been four years since their last record, Gilla Band haven’t been sitting around. From the moment they handed in ‘Most Normal,’ the band immediately got to work on ‘Pugnello’. “I think we were just eager to start writing” Alan tells me, “We just kind of dived into writing and the past four years have been slowly chipping away at this. It’s not like four years of freaking out about it or anything. We all have jobs outside of the band so it’s more of a slow process.”

The result of this “chipping away” is fourth album ‘Pugnello’. This name’s origin is about as unexpected as the album’s wonderfully jarring changes of tone, coming from a horror story written by Dara’s uncle: “He has this story about a haunted font called Pugnello. Basically the idea was someone got a laptop and they were using this font and what they were writing got scary. It’s kind of like Garth Marenghi.”

Comedy has always played an important role in Gilla Band’s music, even if their brand of abrasive noise rock doesn’t inspire laugh-out-loud reactions on first listen. “Being pulled very intensely from one thing to another is something that we’ve all really enjoyed and we’ve had little musical jokes in the tracks throughout the years,” Alan shares. For example, ‘Lawman’ deliberately contains “the worst drum fill ever,” while ‘The Last Riddler’ contains a random D chord, which “sounds completely crap” but has accidentally become integral for counting the band in when they play live.

Alongside the musical jokes, the new album’s lyrics are characteristically playful too. When writing opener ‘Angelus,’ Dara looked up as many cliche sayings as he could, even throwing in a few of his own too. “People always say “the best thing since sliced bread,” and people just accept that. But it’s actually such a weird thing to say. So I put them all together like “the dog’s bollocks.”

On their second album ‘The Talkies,’ Dara famously forced himself not to use any pronouns in his lyrics, leading to the album sounding like a series of rambled statements rather than stories focused on individual characters. “It was really difficult to write that record because of using no pronouns. But because I restricted myself, I was able to enjoy writing freely from after that.” This freedom led to the new album focusing on “grief and nostalgia and comforts.”

As well as chipping away on the new album, the last four years have seen Gilla Band’s members pursuing different exciting creative routes too. Dara, for example, became interested in painting, even creating ‘Pugnello’s hypnotic album cover. “I got these really crap photographs, it could be like a thumb over the lens or an out of focus thing, and then I’d paint acrylic onto it and I’d kind of dig in. I listened to the record while viewing all the paintings, so it kind of was like painting the sound of the record, I guess, as cool as that sounds,” he dryly comments, before bragging that he got a printer/scanner two days before the interview.

Meanwhile, guitarist Alan was experimenting himself, making music under The Null Club, collaborating with some of the most exciting names in experimental music, including E L U C I D and Mandy, Indiana. This experience influenced his approach to Gilla Band too: “Collaborating with other people and learning how to do stuff production-wise by myself, I was able to transfer skills that I had learned and use them, such as programming drum machines… writing by yourself or collaborating with other people is really really cool but it does put it into light how special it is to write with the rest of the band.”

This electronic influence is hardly foreign territory for Gilla Band, who even covered Blawan’s techno classic ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage’ in 2015, a track which inadvertently became a staple in their live set, which the band love to play live but avoid practising too much: “It’s just like one note, one beat and one line for eight minutes… I’m happy to be associated with it” Dara explains fondly.

As much as the repetition, weight and body of techno beats have inspired the band, Alan tells me that the technology itself is as much of an inspiration as the music it creates. For each album, Gilla Band have had the philosophy of “get new stuff,” acquiring two or three pieces of new gear, putting things through it and “seeing what it spits back at you”.

On ‘Most Normal,’ this gear included a little noise synth box and a lap steel guitar; on ‘Pugnello‘ it was the Perkons drum machine and the Onward guitar pedal from Chase Bliss, a “weird glitchy freeze strange little weird pedal” that worked as well on guitars and it did vocals.

Accompanying the new album is a much anticipated tour of America, Europe and the UK. “I think we’re going to try to play as much off the new record as possible,” Dara explains, “With some tracks, it’s nice to just give them a bit of a break because we’ve been playing certain songs for 14 years or something.”

Alongside these old favourites will of course be the new tracks, of which five or six the band can actually play, leaving them the fun of figuring out how to play the others. “I think this is the first time we’ve wrote a record where we felt comfortable with the idea that the live versions of the tracks could be quite different from the recorded versions,” Alan says.

All in all, Gilla Band are just excited to get back on the road, continuing to release music that pushes themselves into unknown creative territory. Far from a career slump, ‘Pugnello’ sees the band develop yet again, grabbing hold of a repeated line or guitar wail and rinsing each one to its painful conclusion. There isn’t another band playing currently who can make such difficult music so much fun to listen to.

New album ‘Pugnello’ is out on Friday 25th September via Rough Trade Records.

Listen to the singles here: