Girl Band: Holding Hands with Jamie

Bailing out of the blocks like surf-rock attack dogs chasing down an intruder, Girl Band simply go for your throat with a full on scorched electric takedown.

This Dublin four-piece have found their sound and it is a scuzzed-up, industrial-tinged and warped version of The Fall.

Composing of Dara Kiely (vocals), Alan Duggan (guitar), Daniel Fox (bass) and Adam Faulkner (drums), they have been playing together since they were teenagers. The noise they make is blistering, visceral and downright frightening. Nowhere is this more apparent than on their new album Holding Hands with Jamie.

Right from the off it spits with venom, rage and quite a large amount of insanity. By the time we reach 'Baloo', Fox's bass is a snarling counterpoint to Kiely's pitch-bent and scream-shouted vocals. It sounds cathartic, almost like an exorcism of frenzied inner demons.

'Paul' is the glorious highlight; cloaked in the boil and hiss of chainsaw guitars, chaotic drums, warping bass and Kiely's tortured vocals, it becomes a baffling, disturbing and twisted joy. Demons are excised with such vitriol the sound explodes outward like massive coronal emissions. This is more than post-punk, more than post-hardcore, it is a genre all of its own, rage-core.

Onwards the album careers through blistering shorts ‘The Last Riddler’ and ‘Texting an Alien’ before being washed up on the shores of the jagged and textured ‘Fucking Butter’ and the white noise assault of ‘The Witch Dr.’

Everything about this album is forged from periods of deep anxiety and stark and ravaged introspection as chronicled in Kiely's struggles with mental health. This is music spewed up from the depths of the earth, from the howling masses of non-conformist fury.  

Full of absurdist imagery and dark humour each track crashes into the other becoming a static-drenched whole. Girl Band have arrived very noisily into the station with tonnes of style and swagger.

Buy this, listen to this and become flooded with the adrenalin-soaked power of the mass, it is exhausting but hugely rewarding.

Holding Hands with Jamie is out now

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