Having moved from hopeful status to a benchmark, the Dublin quartet keeps moving forward at full throttle, at the heart of an electro-rock storm crackling with noisy flashes.
How do you rebound when you’ve shifted from the status of hope to influence, without ever really stepping into the “star” slot? For Gilla Band, apparently it takes staying in the cargo hold of a moving Boeing and throwing a wild rave there, with their faces pressed against the engine. Four years after Most Normal (2022), Pugnello pushes even further along this path. For the Dubliners, fever is no calculation.
While a portion of the new guitar-driven scene has grown up in their wake, they continue to treat their band as a separate pursuit. Daniel Fox works as a producer (Sprints, Lambrini Girls…), while Adam Faulkner and Alan Duggan Borges pursue their own projects, and Dara Kiely has taken up painting. As if the four friends only reunite under Gilla Band when they feel the need.
Humor and tragedy cohabit without transition
On Pugnello, that urgency becomes a machine. Acquired in 2022, the Erica Synths Perkons drum machine changed the way they write, bringing their old electronic loves to the foreground. At times almost club-like, the record does not aim to become dancefloor-ready, however. Gilla Band doesn’t make techno: they feed it into a machine that grinds guitars and voices. The result is brutal, exhausting, but also jubilant. This machinery seems to reflect what goes on in Dara Kiely’s head.
The singer allegedly dreamt of making a crooner record: he has probably never shouted as much. On Jacobsons, he contemplates the death of his father—absent—and his guilt at not feeling more sorrow. Then family history, boxing, football, Power Rangers, Megazord and other childhood references collide. For Dara Kiely, memory is not an archive but a buoy.
That is what makes Pugnello sometimes almost unhealthy. Thoughts spin in circles, humor and tragedy cohabit without transition, like a consciousness unable to distance itself from things. Even the cover, created by Dara Kiely from an old photographic print covered in paint, extends this attempt to reconstruct the past.
Pugnello is ultimately far from being the record of a band seeking to confirm its status. It is the work of four musicians who refuse to know exactly where they’re going, or who simply don’t know. Gilla Band has yet to find the exit from the rave, nor the exit from the cargo hold, and that’s for the best.
Pugnello (Rough Trade Records/Wagram). Out on September 25. In concert at the Trabendo, Paris, on January 20, 2027.
