More about: Gilla Band

It’s a tricky thing, noise-rock. Do it wrong, and it’s completely unlistenable. Do it right, and you can take sounds that seem unconducive to musicality and create music that is not only enjoyable but impossibly fun. Gilla Band, formerly known as Girl Band, have perfected the latter category on their new album Most Normal. Toeing the line between brash and measured, simple and expansive, it’s an ambitious album that speaks volumes for the innovation of its creators.  We sat down with the band’s bassist and engineer, Daniel Fox, to get the full story.

Gilla Band’s last album, The Talkies, arrived in 2019, and certain setbacks which need not be named – referred to as ‘The Event’ in our conversation – forced Gilla Band to take a different approach in making their third album.  “During that first summer during lockdown we were obviously just as bored as everyone else, so we’d meet up on Zoom and drink a couple of cans to just be around each other. And we started talking about it,” says Daniel. “We were just kind of chipping away at it slowly. But it was nice in a way because it was a much slower process, continuously doing it as opposed to on the previous records.” Since they managed to complete their album release and touring schedule before the pandemic hit, they were able to close the chapter of The Talkies and move straight into new territory.

Most Normal also marks their first album released under the name Gilla Band, having changed their name from Girl Band in 2021. On the outside, it might have seemed like an impulsive decision for an up-and-coming band, but it took a lot of thought behind the scenes, Daniel explains: “It took a while for us between the four of ourselves to come to a consensus on it. But once we all came to that conclusion, we made the decision. And it’s one of those things where once you arrive there you can’t go back from it”.

You can imagine the response. Take a look through the replies to their announcement tweet and the words “woke”, “pandering” and “publicity stunt” appear more than once. But Daniel says that the “heated emails” they received were more of a bucket list moment and that the band haven’t felt like the name change has been a setback for them. “All the other concerns about the band career aspect of it, all that kind of crap didn’t really feel like it was that important.”

Most Normal is a landmark in more ways than one for the band, also being the first album that Daniel recorded and mixed by himself. He’s no stranger to the process, having already worked on MELTS, Windings and Eyesore & The Jinx releases and working on Gilla Band’s previous outings with external collaborators. Rather than a decision forced upon them by the isolating nature of recent years, this was a step the band felt ready to take. “I think it was at a point where we felt we were ready to do that, and we just thought it would be quicker and more streamlined to just do it ourselves,” Daniel explains. “I felt more ready, like we were all just confident enough in ourselves to do it.”

"You just have to wait for the right thing to come and then it’s there..."

The slower nature of making this album allowed them to take their time with some songs where they needed it. Daniel compares the process to fishing: “you just have to wait for the right thing to come and then it’s there”. One example of this was ‘Post Ryan’, the album closer that takes distortion and feedback to new levels before transforming into an entirely different beast by the end of the song. “We came up with the first half of it very quickly, in a day’s session when we were working away, and then we couldn’t find a second part for it. And we were chipping away at it, we couldn’t get anything that we liked in probably a year and a bit. Every so often we’d come back to it and try to come up with a second part and couldn’t get anything we liked. And then we did, and that second half came together probably in about 20 minutes.”

The comparatively lyric-heavy, glitching ‘I Was Away’ required less sculpting from the band. “For a couple of months, we were like, ‘we have to work out how it actually goes.’ And we were trying to come up with some clever way of arranging it, and eventually, we just went back to the first version when we weren’t thinking about it.”

One concept that inspired Most Normal was the band’s desire to create a “headphone experience”, something they achieved not just by thinking of sound, but also of space: “There’s some production choices, just being heavy-handed with effects on the whole track and with the headphones, think of things moving, thinking about space and just being a bit bold with the mix decisions and the production decision”.

To help master this sense of space, Gilla Band looked beyond noise-rock and post-punk into more diverse sonic inspirations – hip-hop, says Daniel, played a massive role in the production choices on Most Normal. “I think a lot of that kind of thing was from a production point of view. Like Earl Sweatshirt, some rap songs and records where the whole song might get filtered down and sound like it’s underwater for a few seconds and it sounds like it’s constantly moving. There’s a group called Standing On The Corner, with this track called ‘Angel’ which is really good, but you get some of the vocal effects.”

The album, by design, jars the listener with sonic effects that force you to reconsider what music can be. One particular high-pitched drone that leads us into ‘The Weirds’ made me switch to headphones, for fear that my flatmates would think something was broken. “In a way that’s kind of the idea,” Daniel clarifies.  “When we first did it Dara was like ‘Oh God, can you turn that off that’s really horrible.’ We just like playing with the format, as well. It’s expansive to what you can do and get away with it.”. Although it doesn’t make it an easy listen, this brashness makes Most Normal an innovative and unique record.

So how do you go about taking this album on the road for gigs which are quite the opposite of a headphone experience? “Because we’re going on tour, there’s a couple of the tunes were written via recording it as opposed to writing it then recording it, so we’ve been trying to reverse-engineer how to play them over the last week or so. With our stuff, anyway, there’s probably less than one would think. Because a lot of the sounds that we do would be fairly full-on, big full-range sounds. Having tonnes and tonnes of layers can turn it into nothing.”

As well as the music, there are enough scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs lyrics to drive an audience wild. “I can’t wear hats I just get slagged” from ‘Binliner Fashion’ has already proved to be a live hit, while ‘Capgras’ boasts what is arguably the best line in any song ever: “I hate Ryanair” (“I think it’s probably a bit of a universal experience. I think everyone can relate to hating Ryanair.”)

Today, Dublin hosts one of the most vibrant and exciting rock scenes around, and Gilla Band were one of the pioneering artists for this back in 2015 when they released their debut album. It was very different when we were starting off. I don’t think there was much of an eye on Dublin, for one, and also the kind of music we were playing. I don’t think there was much appetite for it. I think when we first came out in Dublin anyway we were just met with a slight air of perplexion.” In just seven years, things have changed significantly: I think people these days are a lot more savvy than when we were coming up. Bands are much more informed on how to engage with touring and business. It’s much easier to get the information where it didn’t really feel like it, we were very naïve when we were starting out.”

Although we know them as another name now, Gilla Band are still the same group of musicians that we knew and loved in 2019, evolving organically and developing natural even under the strange circumstances of the last few years. And above all, says Daniel, “We’re just trying to write good songs.” On Most Normal, that mission is more than accomplished.

Most Normal is out now

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More about: Gilla Band