{"id":781314,"date":"2026-09-24T18:02:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781314\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T18:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:02:11","slug":"gilla-band-pugnello-review-furious-originality-fuelled-by-cathartic-aggression-and-absurdist-confessions-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781314\/","title":{"rendered":"Gilla Band: Pugnello review \u2013 furious originality fuelled by cathartic aggression and absurdist confessions | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilla Band have attracted some impressive plaudits since announcing their fourth album this summer. A feature in Pitchfork<\/a> heralding its arrival described them as \u201cIreland\u2019s most influential band since My Bloody Valentine<\/a>\u201d. Should any readers feel this was a classic example of music journalism hyperbole, it was followed up with a succession of quotes from the Dublin quartet\u2019s musical peers, all eager to attest to their importance, originality and impact. One of them, Selin Macieira-Bo\u015fgelmez \u2013 one half of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls<\/a> \u2013 went so far as to say precisely the kind of thing about Gilla Band that people said about My Bloody Valentine 35 years ago: \u201cThey basically reinvented guitar music.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artwork for Pugnello.<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, there\u2019s something faintly disappointing about the fact that Pugnello opens with a very prosaic and familiar sound indeed: that of someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar. But then something disconcertingly odd happens. The power chord doesn\u2019t fade away. It just \u2026 keeps going, for the best part of two and half minutes. That grinding drone underpins a track called The Angelus, punctuated by frantic bursts of warp-speed rhythm that would sound like drum\u2019n\u2019bass breakbeats were it not for the fact that they appear to be played live on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares. The drone is eventually replaced by a series of ferocious, shuddering bass explosions, overlaid with a sound that could, theoretically, be feedback, but most evokes a dial-up modem.<\/p>\n

Throughout, frontman Dara Kiely keeps up a torrent of spoken-word vocals. Sometimes he seems utterly anguished, his voice a raw-throated scream. At other points, he appears to reference the theme tune of the old cartoon Top Cat \u2013 \u201chis close friends get to call him TC\u201d \u2013 and the kids\u2019 TV show Bananas in Pyjamas. The sense of WTF? is overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the sense of WTF? doesn\u2019t abate until Pugnello finally draws to a close 42 minutes later. In the interim, the listener is confronted with the kind of music that leaves you casting about for something to compare it to and coming up with only the vaguest suggestions \u2013 not a regular occurrence when dealing with alternative rock in 2026, which tends to wear its influences very much on its sleeve. You can see why people keep mentioning My Bloody Valentine in relation to Gilla Band \u2013 the contents of Pugnello certainly invoke the jarring, exhilarating experience of hearing Loveless or the Tremolo EP in 1991, and boggling at the idea that it\u2019s actually supposed to sound like that.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Gilla Band: Alogia \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Gilla Band\u2019s is a resolutely contemporary sound, glitching and juddering like a faulty signal, less interested in melody than it is in texture. There\u2019s nothing in the way of a hummable tune: Pugnello\u2019s power comes from the way it drags the listener headlong through sudden shifts in tone and volume, as when the weird electronically treated vocals of At the Gallop are shelled by eruptions of noise, or when Computer Sadness\u2019s racing heartbeat pulse is disrupted by blasts of atonal guitar. The album\u2019s closest musical relation might be found not in alt-rock but the punishing, industrial-flecked techno of Regis or Surgeon. You catch an echo of it in Placeholder<\/a>\u2019s monstrous distorted bass line, the machine rhythms of The Megazord and especially Alogia<\/a>, where a particularly urgent brand of funk is overlaid with blaring klaxon-like tones.<\/p>\n

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Meanwhile, if your vocal style involves barking out a stream of spoken word lyrics at turns acerbic and absurd, you\u2019re inevitably going to get compared to the Fall, and so it proves. There\u2019s a definite hint of Mark E Smith about some of Kiely\u2019s cadences and indeed about his way with a put-down: \u201cI\u2019m injecting a lethal amount of nothing,\u201d he sings on Placeholder, \u201cI\u2019m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay.\u201d But abstract as they are, you can\u2019t miss a certain confessional cast to Kiely\u2019s lyrics, which frequently touch on both the singer\u2019s mental health \u2013 he\u2019s been diagnosed with schizophrenia \u2013 and his fractured relationship with his late father. Amid the torrent of imagery he spews forth on Jacobsons, there\u2019s an affecting depiction of trying and failing to summon the requisite emotions around his dad\u2019s death: \u201cI should,\u201d he bellows frantically, \u201cbe more sad\u201d.<\/p>\n

Clearly, Pugnello is the dictionary definition of \u201cnot for everyone\u201d, although, like a lot of extreme music, it feels fitting in the context of 2026. You could view it as a suitably anxious, unpredictable soundtrack to anxious, unpredictable times; you might equally find it exhilaratingly cathartic. What you would definitely struggle to do is set it in any kind of complementary musical context: Pugnello is the work of a band audibly \u2013 and thrillingly \u2013 out on their own.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This week Alexis listened to<\/p>\n

Bonnie \u201cPrince\u201d Billy \u2013 I See a Darkness (Live in the City of Ghosts)
Some gentle respite from the album of the week: the old BPB classic beautifully reimagined on his album Ghosts of American Psychonauts<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gilla Band have attracted some impressive plaudits since announcing their fourth album this summer. A feature in Pitchfork…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-781314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}