Gilla Band are happy to announce their brand new album Pugnello released on the 25th September 2026 on Rough Trade Records. The album was recorded from 2022 – 2026 across three studios, Hellfire, Yellow Door Music Studio, & Sonic Studios in Dublin, the album was produced by Gilla Band & it was recorded and mixed by Daniel. Fox. The album will be available on Deluxe Gatefold LP with glued in lyric booklet + pearl colour vinyl + indie colour LP, and Standard LP & CD.
Gilla Band never know where they’re going next. For over ten years now, the Dublin quartet — vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox, and drummer Adam Faulkner — have been redefining what you could loosely call “rock music” in the 21st century, influencing a wide swath of similarly forward-thinking guitar acts along the way. Across 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, 2019’s The Talkies, and 2022’s Most Normal, the band perfected a vision that wasn’t quite post-punk, wasn’t quite noise-rock, wasn’t quite anything besides an idiosyncratic, ground-breaking hybrid that could only come from the four of them. As soon as they submitted Most Normal for mastering, they began the patient search for their next destination. Over time, the process led them to their fourth album Pugnello, the boldest left turn in a career full of them.
In the four years since Most Normal, each member embarked on other artistic endeavors. Kiely fostered a newfound love of painting, Faulkner played drums for Lankum on the road, Fox became an increasingly in-demand producer guiding ascendant acts like Sprints, Lambrini Girls, and Mandy, Indiana, while Duggan Borges launched his solo project the Null Club with collaborations featuring Mandy, Indiana’s Valentine Caulfield, the Horrors’ Faris Badwan, Miss Grit, and Brooklyn MC Elucid. All their extracurricular activity existed in parallel with the exploratory route towards Pugnello, but also informed the band as they reconvened to crystallize the album’s vision.
“We always want each album to be its own thing,” Duggan Borges says. “They capture the different phases all of us have experienced in between.”
‘Placeholder’
In this track I try to analyse my mental quirks by exploring my comfort distractions. Reverting back to childhood nostalgia – as an escape. The memories seeping into my day-to-day adult life. Representing personal mental health behaviours via outdated pop culture such as the anxious tension set by Davina McCall’s silence when announcing a Big Brother eviction, or the fight or flight that Harold Lloyd surely experienced when holding on to a clock for dear life, and all for our entertainment.
I mention Power Rangers at the end of this. It was another comfort vice. They were a huge thing for me as a child. I remember I was at some sort of Christian summer camp when I was about 6 and was asked what I want to be when I grow up. I said “a Power Ranger”. I was laughed at and was told the shocking truth that they didn’t exist and it is not a profession worth pursuing. I’ve never forgiven them for that.
“I’m injecting a lethal dose of nothing. I’m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay” …. True story.
WATCH: Gilla Band – ‘Placeholder’
“With every album, I try to document the events of my life since the last one,” Kiely explains. On Pugnello, he grapples with the loss of his estranged father and parses snapshots of a fragmented childhood. The album’s headspace is one of living grief, in which stray recollections, the comfort of nostalgia, adopted father figures, and fictional conversations mingle freely. It’s an evolution of Kiely’s old surrealist style, fusing hilarious non-sequiturs with viscerally confessional fourth-wall breaks. Across the album, Kiely navigates the haze of grief and mortality, cataloguing a mind flitting through the years before finding its way back to balance.
All of this is held in the title Pugnello, an esoteric reference that, once unlocked, provides the poignant framing for all of Kiely’s memories. The name is a haunted tongue in a novel written by one of Kiely’s uncles, and in his own hands becomes an avatar for the secret languages that exist within families, the web of in-jokes and sibling misadventures and traumas that tangle together in a way only they know.
Even with their long history of experimentation, Pugnello finds Gilla Band in uncharted territory, venturing to places thematically and creatively they could only visit after the trust and intuition built through years of making art together. Pugnello — at once accessible and challenging, horrifying and beautiful — is a culmination of four friends pushing further and further. “A lot of times bands get further down the road and grow comfortable in their execution,” Fox concludes. “We’re still hungry for experience, for new things. I don’t think we could’ve made this album before. It took all of us learning together, all of the time.”
Gilla Band
Pugnello
Release Date – 25th September 2026
