Gilla Band on mental health, tinnitus and a new album

Formerly known as Girl Band, the Dublin four-piece are back with their weirdest record yet

Mon, 03 Oct, 2022 - 21:00

Eoghan O’Sullivan

The last line on Gilla Band’s third studio album, Most Normal, is the most memorable. The music stops as Dara Kiely pronounces: “I get, inevitable depression when I do nothing.”

He repeats it just in case you think you might have misheard. Post Ryan is the most direct song he’s ever written — the group, formerly known as Girl Band, have been going for about a decade — and tackles his well-documented mental health head-on.

The Dublin four-piece have had to cancel shows in the past due to such issues, while in recent weeks the likes of Mercury Prize winner Arlo Parks, arena-conquering Sam Fender, and, closer to home, Ryan McMullan have pulled shows and tours to focus on their own mental health.

To hear Kiely addressing his struggles on the album closer feels at once uncomfortable and taboo, and yet it’s thrilling. “I'm in between breakdowns, constantly In recovery,” he sings on the closest thing resembling a chorus.

Kiely says Post Ryan was hard to finish, though mainly because of Covid lockdowns interrupting the recording process — the album was self-produced, recorded, and mixed by bassist Daniel Fox at Sonic Studios in Stoneybatter (the band is completed by guitarist Alan Duggan and drummer Adam Faulkner).

His bandmates had challenged Kiely to write something “not whimsical”; when he came in to show them what he’d come up with, he was so nervous he had to leave the room. “They're really supportive about it,” he says. “So I think it's really cool now to actually just test yourself to do that stuff because then if it didn't work out, I'd be very reluctant to try that again in the near future. So it's nice to have that in the arsenal of writing.”

The name change, from Girl Band to Gilla Band, was made in a statement in November 2021: “We apologise for choosing a misgendered name in the first place and to anyone who has been hurt or affected by it.”

Gilla Band play the National Stadium, Dublin, on December 9

Was it a hard choice to make? “I think we all arrived at the decision at different points,” says Duggan. “But once we did, it was very easy for us to all just be like, let’s just change it. What was hard was coming up with a new name. That took a while — that took f**king ages.”

Most Normal, is, despite the name, their weirdest album yet. They’ve always been challenging — second album The Talkies in 2019 began with the very real sound of Kiely having a panic attack — but well, take the nearly seven-minute track at the centre of it, aptly titled The Weird, which begins and concludes with a shrill, ear-piercing ring.

Kiely’s thoughts on it: “That's absolutely disgusting. I hated it. But then I got used to it. I like it now.” Duggan says: “I really like that, it sounds like tinnitus.”

The guitarist, who revels in a plethora of pedals and distorting his instrument’s sound to unrecognisable places, reveals he’s actually had tinnitus since he was young. “My brothers used to be in a band and they used to practise in my sitting room. So when I was like, five or six, I would just sit down and watch them rehearse. And I think that's where I probably got it. I think so. I can't really point to anything specifically, but I've just always had it.”

He qualifies that he didn’t even know how piercing the ringing was on The Weird. “I couldn't really make out how harsh it was because I think it was at the same register as my tinnitus.”

Kiely, citing the Sopranos and Twin Peaks as influences, says the initial idea for the album was that it would loosely sound like a dream, though he admits only a couple tracks really succeed in that regard. But again, we can’t get away from the lyrics.

It’s easy to project them onto Kiely, rather than presuming they’re characters of his imagination. How self-reflective are they? “I guess it's where I am now. I always say this — I love how Bob Dylan, for example, documented his entire life by an album. So you could say, ‘What was it like when I was 24?’ ‘Oh, God, I was into that.’

"And I always had that in mind when we started the band. So this one is where I was at and where I am now. It’s actually just quite a happy place, quite nice. I think the lyrics are really playful, I don't think they're that dark. I think there's some sort of tension to them, particularly in Post-Ryan.”