HousePlants: 'We can make the art for art's sake, in a very real way'

Noonan, best known for his role fronting indie stalwarts Bell X1, and the producer and performer Daithí joined forces back in 2018. In 2024, they’re going on a national tour. Kate Demolder writes.

Paul Noonan and Daithí Ó Drónaí of Houseplants, at RTÉ's Studio 8. Pictures: Nina Val

When former Bell X1 frontman Paul Noonan, and musician-producer Daithí Ó Drónaí, who performs as Daithí, first met, it was by way of a track. 

Noonan came to Daithí with ‘Take The Wheel’ [“There is a violence in looking away / When they speak of how it all gets made / And we stay squinting skyward / Oh Jesus, take the wheel”] as he felt he could add to it, as it wasn’t a track Noonan was comfortable working on alone. 

That was in 2018, but the pair stayed in contact, to the point where they spent the pandemic’s successive lockdowns working together from separate homes.

“I remember meeting at the Choice [Prize Awards] and then, as a means of staying in touch as much as keeping the fires of creativity burning, Paul sent me a track called ‘Compenaro’ and we started working on that during the first lockdown and then it just sort of spun out into its own thing, really.”

Noonan had recently completed a music therapy course at the University of Limerick following the rip-roaring success years of his early-aughties rock band, Bell X1, whose work has featured on The OC and Grey’s Anatomy. 

This college work led him to create a family-friendly lockdown project entitled, The Electric Kazoo, an homage to The Muppet Show house band, The Electric Mayhem, while on a 10-week placement in a school in Dublin. 

Paul Noonan and Daithí Ó Drónaí of Houseplants in action at a recent session for RTÉ 2FM. Picture: Nina Val

Ó’Drónaí, at the time, was in Vietnam to play a St Patrick’s Day event, one of a number of international gigs lined up throughout the year.

“We just kept sending each other files and what have you,” Noonan says. “We never thought it would be a band or anything at the start. I guess it was just flirting or whatever you might call it, at the time.”

With that came HousePlants, a collaborative collective that has begotten Choice Prize nominations –with their album, Dry Goods, in 2021, and 2022 EP Seaglass and, more recently, a new album. 

They shared the first taste of what’s to come in this new record with ‘No Pushover’, a lyrical tale, engineered, mixed and mastered by Daithi at Aspen Lane Studio, Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, inspired, fascinatingly, by Elon Musk. Both men laugh as they recall it.

“I read this thing, which talked about him being really into this idea called ‘The Simulation’,” Noonan smiles. “Which is a theory that some sort of life form, or version of ourselves millennia hence, are controlling us presently, and what we experience as life is actually a simulation by some advanced species. Elon likes to talk about this in the hot tub with his brother, which was just a really strong surreal image. I sort of wrote the song from the point of view of someone who thinks that might be sort of the ultimate inner circle, to be in the hot tub with Elon Musk talking about whether life is real at all.”

'PRIMARILY FOR DANCING'

Musically, HousePlants makes textured but playful music that often sounds like a cross between LCD Soundsystem, The Thrills, and, naturally, Bell X1. 

It’s a mix that caters to those of an indie persuasion, like their excellent track, ‘Seaglass [“I wanna age like a glass of the sea, and lose my edge so gracefully / I wanna taste the air as I move”], as well as electronica stalwarts waiting for the visceral 2am festival slots.

“It’s music primarily for dancing,” Noonan says.

“I’ve always found genre really difficult,” Daithí interjects. “I always find it really hard to kind of stick within a boundary of some kind. I mean, the way that I kind of understand HousePlants is that it has loads of these dance elements like these kinds of big arpeggiators or the synth sounds that are really pretty massive. But the whole bedrock of the thing is live drums, really. Like, live drums and either bass guitar or bass. The live drum thing is really what brings it from being a real house, techno-type situation to more of a band-type thing. So yeah, it kind of has indie elements to it, but it’s it’s very dancey.”

Paul Noonan of Houseplants. Picture: Nina Val

“I’ll die on this hill,” Noonan smiles. “Because Bell X1 really suffered from the genre thing. So I really love the fact that, for me, HousePlants has kind of very narrow parameters. And this is what it is. And more importantly, this is what it isn’t. For me, doing the live shows has been such a huge part of informing what we are and what we’re going for. For this new record, we want people to move. The rhythm is going to get you, as Gloria Estefan said. And we want it to appeal to our primal sort of desire to move collectively.”

Dance music fans are notorious for navel-gazing debates about what constitutes ‘real dance music’. Noonan and Ó’Drónaí, indisputably the buzziest new duo playing disputable dance, pre-empt the debates by being both more and less real than the competition. In an age of musical ghostwriters and digital interference, they are a true duo and a virtuosic one. Everything they produce with HousePlants is entirely self-generated; the artwork, social media, visual identity and engineering are all done in-house.

“Without that ethos, it would be very hard to get HousePlants off the ground,” Daithí says. “And it’s not like, you know, this is a money-making thing,”

“We haven’t made money out of this,” says Noonan, “but that’s not the point. We’re lucky enough to have other things going on so we can do this. That’s been really liberating, that we can make the art for the art’s sake, and in a very real way.”

“We put a band together on that kind of ethos as well,” Daithí says. “That we’re all mates who would be happy to hang out with each other if the gig got cancelled.”

HONESTY AND RAWNESS

It’s clear that for both Noonan and Ó’Drónaí, music exists in a cerebral sphere. More than once they mention the impact it has on bodies, minds and neural pathways, and the importance of live performance. 

It makes sense that their chosen route out of the pandemic, music, holds weight. Indeed, this duo makes party music for adults down to seek pockets of unexpected joy. 

And HousePlants feels like an excuse for Noonan and Ó’Drónaí to enjoy each other’s company, with anyone else’s enjoyment of their upbeat, atmospheric and euphoric electronic rock feeling almost incidental.

“HousePlants has always been about reaching out and connecting,” Ó’Drónaí says sweetly.

“There’s an honesty and rawness to the lyrics, production, and visuals. I think that’s what both the band and the audience really connect to, and you see it in full force when we get to play to an audience, There’s nothing like it.”

Daithí Ó Drónaí of Houseplants. Picture: Nina Val

HousePlants encourage listeners to briefly pause endless fretting and remember what it feels like to get lost in a haze. Despite the unending heaviness of world events, there is still room for inanity; delight doesn’t always need to feel indulgent, and art doesn’t need to be sombre or humourless, as reflected in their choice of name.

“The trick with a band name is that you have to leave enough room to colour it in yourself,” Noonan smiles. “If it connotes too much off the bat, it’s hard to kind of make it your own. ‘House plants,’ is a lyric from our first song on this journey, “What’s With All The Pine?” and it had sort of modern, sort of homely, little bit artificial sort of vibes.”

“Everybody loves them,” Daithí laughs. “When we started there were always plants on the stage or whatever. And that’s graduated to people turning up to our gigs dressed as plants. Like a big flower with someone’s head in the middle. That sort of positivity is kind of what we’re all about, particularly when that can feel more and more rare.”

• HousePlants Spring tour: Róisín Dubh, Galway (April 12), Button Factory, Dublin (April 26), Dolan’s, Limerick (April 27), and Cyprus Avenue, Cork (May 24). Tickets on sale from houseplants.band