Gilla Band
+ MODEL/ACTRIZWe’re delighted to be welcoming the mighty Gilla Band to play a headline show at Future Yard in May. While the Dublin four-piece’s cataclysmic sound avoids consignment to any singular genre, the thrusting noise-rock guitars, heavy techno drum beats and wailing vocals paired with frontman Dara Kiely’s witty, mundane and often surrealist lyrics create “as perfect an expression of rock’n’roll’s essential auto-destructive impulse as this writer’s ever heard” (The Guardian).
The noisy Dublin quartet are firm Future Yard favourites, with tracks from their three Rough Trade-released regularly featuring on the FY stereo. Trailblazers for modern Irish alternative music and known for their ferocious live shows which have been described as chaotic, electrifying and “genuinely dangerous, like one last rave before the apocalypse”, Gilla Band are not just a band, but a force.
Support comes in the form of the New York noise rock din of Model/Actriz, fresh off their white-hot debut album Dogsbody.
Tickets available now.
For their first album as Gilla Band (formerly Girl Band), the foursome has redrawn their own paradigm. Most Normal is like little you’ve heard before, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of noise put in service of broken pop songs, FX-strafed avant-punk rollercoaster rides and passages of futurist dancefloor nihilism.
Most Normal opens with an absolute industrial-noise banger that sounds like a manic house-party throbbing through the walls of the next room as a downed jetliner brings death from above. What follows is unpredictable, leading the listener through a sonic house of mirrors, where the unexpected awaits around every corner.
The common thread holding Most Normal’s ambitious avant-pop shapes together is frontman Dara Kiely. Throughout, he’s an antic, antagonistic presence, barking wild, hilarious, unsettling spiels, babbling about smearing fish with lubricant or dressing up in bin-liners or having to wear hand-me-down boot-cut jeans (“It was a big, shameful thing, growing up, not being able to afford the look I wanted and having to wear all my brother’s old clothes”, says Kiely).
Most Normal, then, is a triumph, the bold work of a group who’ve taken the time to evolve their ideas, to deconstruct and reconstruct their music and rebuild it into something new, something challenging and infinitely rewarding. It’s a headphone masterpiece. It’s a majestic exploration of the infinite possibilities of noise. It’s a bold riposte to your parochial beliefs on whatever a pop song can or should be. It’s the best work these musicians have put to (mangled) tape.
"The Irish band’s unrelenting third album, made with an arcade of pedals and processors, surges with electricity. Inside all of its noise is an indignant, surreal mania that gives it a twisted pop soul.” - Pitchfork
Future Yard presents
Gilla Band
+ Model/Actriz
Friday 26th May 2023
75 Argyle Street
Doors 7.45pm
Tickets £15 advance
#thefutureisbirkenhead
Tickets available online in advance or in person at the Future Yard Box Office. Any remaining tickets will be available on the door.
Future Yard is a cashless venue – all payments are taken by contactless or chip and pin. Live curfew 11pm.
If you have any specific access requests, please read all of the details about accessibility at Future Yard here.
SUSTAINABILITY @ FUTURE YARD
Future Yard CIC is committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral grassroots music venue in the region
As part of this pledge we offer 10% off food and drink if you walk or cycle to the venue (bike racks available in our garden).
You can read more about our Sustainability Pledge in our Roadmap here.
MODEL/ACTRIZ
Dogsbody, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Model/Actriz (vocalist Cole Haden, guitarist Jack Wetmore, drummer Ruben Radlauer, and bassist Aaron Shapiro), is a coming-of-age album set between the hours of dusk and dawn. It is as much an exploration of love and loss as it is a sharp, piercing, and violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive – the overwhelming brightness of staring at the sun.
The music takes inspiration from the physicality and repetition in electronic music, and the relentlessly propulsive sounds of the cityscape and cycling overground trains. The band was inspired by dance music and how it can be rebuilt, remixed, or broken down into the core elements that keep a song intact and incisive. Co-produced and mixed by Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, The Body, Battles), the record feels inherently tactile; written in starkly different environments (Shapiro’s parents’ house in Vermont, Haden’s grandfather’s cabin in Pennsylvania, the Pfizer building in Brooklyn, as well as the basement of Tribeca art gallery the Hole) and reconstituted into the band’s own world.
“On its debut album, the New York band’s expertly contained noise-rock din is the perfect foil to frontman Cole Haden’s white-hot charisma.”