Gilla Band – Pugnello: A pressure cooker of grief, schizophrenia and Power Rangers

The fourth album from Gilla Band, the Dublin four-piece of vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner – whose scouring, gleefully abrasive noise-rock, with collapsing riffs, whipping walls of noise and Dara Kiely’s frayed, funny and harrowing lyrics are always a welcome return, particularly when the world has recently been matching the band’s discordant discombobulation in its current affairs.

The band are already a unique proposition that have become one of the most thrilling and uncompromising forces in modern music, and not just here in Ireland. Pugnello deepens that reputation.

Dara Kiely’s most personal record

Pugnello is Dara Kiely’s most personal, and most characteristically strange set of lyrics yet, folding childhood escapism and iconic pop culture TV moments into his adult day-to-day. It moves between grief, namechecks ’90s footballers Gary Lineker, Neil “Razor” Ruddock, Jean-Marc Bosman, Robbie Fowler, the crisis of Saipan, at least two Beatles references, Power Rangers, pure daftness and, his diagnosis with schizophrenia while he was writing for the record as addressed on ‘Alogia’ – “have your midlife crisis as early as possible / I’ve had three of them,” he quips before screaming preacherman-style “a schizo warned ya!”.

‘Placeholder’ turns his comfort-distractions into a portrait of his own mind with a diving techno-bassline leading to Kiely’s frank confession of “I’m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay”.

‘Giraffe’ finds unexpected tenderness in an Irish mammy chasing him out the door with a hairbrush despite its clopping techno outro and ‘Three Hands Clapping’ finds the recent transplant to Cork alienated from his hometown unfamiliar with the characters who inhabit it (“Dublin in season four”).

A haunted pressure cooker

Even the title is odd: the name of a haunted font on a laptop from a horror novel by Kiely’s uncle, while the sleeve is his own painting worked over blurred, badly framed tour photos, making a positive out of a negative. As he puts it in liner notes accompanying the release, you get through things, not over them.

Musically, the album feels even more of a pressure cooker than before, with the band clearly more readily moving beyond a foundation of guitar music in favour of pummelling industrial hits, metallic noise, pulsating techno-inspired basslines and found digital textures rupturing a hole in the Gilla Band space-time continuum.

Pugnello ratches up the tension to microscopic levels – with barely time for breath, and this is a band who once started an album with the sound of a panic attack.

Noise-rock evolves

This evolution feels natural for a band who have  Daniel Fox, one of the most in-demand producers in alternative music in their midst. His work on recent records for Mandy, Indiana, Lambrini Girls and Sprints feel relevant here, while Alan Duggan Borges’ own side project The Null Club, which leant into noise, techno and experimental hip hop, has no doubt factored into the band’s evolving sonic template – this entire album feels like it is redlining throughout except its makers are immaculately sculpting and placing its frequencies as they go.

Punisher

It’s a punishing record in the best way, an assault on the senses, and comes out of the blocks with ‘The Angelus’, where Kiely recontextualises clichéd everyday phrases like “wearing the face off each other”, “Elvis has left the building”, and “goody two shoes” into a howl of scene-settling rabble-rousing noise – making it easy to imagine what the Sultans Of Ping might have sounded like in a parallel universe where everyone is completely fucked all of the time.

The Death Grips-esque blown-out rubber bass of ‘Jacobsens’ features the line “Where do you go when you’re told to fuck off?”, ‘Computer Sadness’ originally an attempt at a love song – is more like a swirling hall of slurred speech and bass, ‘Crisp Pop’ which pairs Britpop bands with crisp flavours is backed by an aged cheddar funk bassline and snapping drum machine percussion and the closer ‘At The Gallop’ takes inspiration from a Neil Young album curio – 1983’s Trans in which Young employed vocoder to talk to his son with cerebral palsy.

In Kiely’s case, the vocoder is used to stage an imagined last conversation with his late father, with the title a reference to a 1975 album from an Irish artist called Cromwell.

It’s a brittle and woozy end to a bruising record with a Pixies-lyric referencing cutting to the heart of the matter: “I’m so grateful that you’re so hateful to me.” There were hints of this parental loss and turmoil throughout Pugnello prior with the occasional reference to Dad dropped in – some in passing, some more explicit. “I’m a fatherless fuck/ I’m in the dead dad’s club,” he sings on ‘Placeholder’.

That Kiely can brandish such visceral yet emotional meaning in his volatile vocal performance, also speaks to his evolution as a frontman – the nuance of a wide-ranging vocalist who scatters pop culture references to the wind with comedic effect, but leaves you devastated by his soul-baring intimate revelations of living with schizophrenia or losing a parent, if you listen closely enough to what’s being wailed or whispered.

Is it as The Thin Air posit one of the best Irish albums of all time? I’m not sure but Gilla Band are certainly a band who have it in them – and the well is emotionally deep on Pugnello – their deconstructed band noise remains compelling to the hilt, and they still sound exhilarating. Gilla Band are still out in front of all of their peers, forging their own singular haunted existence.

Pugnello is out now on Rough Trade.

Gilla Band play Vicar Street, Dublin on Saturday February 27th 2027.