Girl Band Announce Debut Album: Holding Hands With Jamie

GIRL BAND – Holding Hands With Jamie,

out September 25th on Rough Trade

If you’ve seen Girl Band live, you understand. If you’ve heard The Early Years EP or one of their early, handmade releases – you’ve got a sense.

Recent Kiwi experiences of the band include Alan Holt of NZ Music Commission at The Great Escape Festival in Brighton, UK; “Girl Band have a guitar sound that is comparable to the feeling you get scouring your brain with P120 grit sandpaper for 27 minutes except that the former is highly enjoyable and the latter not so much.” 

NZ Music Industry veteran Rodney Hewson of Homespun Management (Anika Moa, Jesse Sheehan) found himself speechless. “When you are amongst 450 bands playing venues all over town in the space of three short days it’s impossible to see everything. I got lucky.  I saw Girl Band. Fantastic songs, kind of yelled rather than sung.  Guitar howling instead of strummed.  A rhythm section shaking your bones. I was left in a dazed silence. Girl Band are indeed next level.”.

Luckily the band have provided the rest of us with a taster: Click on the image below to watch on youtube

Girl Band are: Dara Kiely (vocals), Alan Duggan (guitar), Daniel Fox (bass) and Adam Faulkner (drums).

Holding Hands with Jamie, Girl Band’s debut album, comes a few years into their tenure; a few years after their first tour; nine days crammed into a Fiat Panda; a few years of stamping 7” sleeves to sell at merch tables and mail-order; a few years of writing songs and touring and developing a live ferocity unmatched by nearly anyone. Recorded in April 2015, two days after returning home from their first-ever US tour, the nine tracks making up Holding Hands with Jamie capture, more than any previous recordings, the tension and abrasive energy of a Girl Band performance.

Going into the studio (Bow Lane, Dublin) to record an album – rather than a track or two here and there – “required a different mindset,” guitarist Alan Duggan explained. “It was way more challenging to stay focused – tricky to find a balance between keeping a distance from the songs for perspective but also to fully concentrate on them.”  While they had the luxury of studio time (“we spent three or four days just setting up drums, amps, and mics”), the band laid down seven of the tracks in less than two days, ensuring that the record pulses with vitality and forward momentum.

Recalling any number of things but for only milliseconds at a time, Girl Band make a mockery of comparisons, because you can only get as far as “oh this bit sounds like—” before a guitar scuff-screams, the bass crunches like a car in a bailing press, or something else visceral and glorious comes from the speakers, and the thought’s erased. This young Dublin foursome are creating vital, propulsive, and almost terrifyingly energetic noise-rock that pulls as much influence from classic techno as from their more obvious post-punk, noise and industrial predecessors.

Press:

“It’s hard to overstate how heart-stopping it is to see these four guys from Dublin play live, but I’ll say they make it sound like the whole world is going to literally explode in a massive, interstellar ball of fire. It’s the end of everything and they’re both indifferent and full of rage.” — NPR

“The one blindingly obvious thing about Girl Band is that this is fucking great.”
– Noisey

“Their cover of [Yorkshire exponent of ‘terror techno’] Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?‘ features distortion and noise like a Hoover crying. It is mechanistic and rhythmical-industrial, not grunge at all, eight minutes of pure panic.”
– The Guardian