When the speakers are throbbing and rattling, spitting a filthy squeal, threatening to split open—do you bolt out of the room or step closer? If you ever attend a Gilla Band show, you will know instantly which their fans prefer. Discomfort is the baseline goal for a band that weaponizes its instruments to such earsplitting magnitudes that they rarely resemble the tried tools of rock music: guitar, bass, drums. “The trick,” bassist Daniel Fox said in a recent interview with Pitchfork, “is to be louder than everyone else.” This is a wild but typical understatement from the humble Irish quartet, which also comprises vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, and drummer Adam Faulkner. Volume—blown out to extremes or dampened before a deafening blast—in no way explains Gilla Band’s precision as songwriters, producers, or engineers. What may sound like chaos is the product of meticulous layering and sonic manipulation that smudges the lines between post-punk, noise, no wave, industrial, and techno. On their exhilarating fourth album, Pugnello, Gilla Band sharpen their implements and go in for the kill. Sure, Pugnello is loud, but it’s the nasty textures, the colliding rhythms, the gnarled vocals, the dense details that affirm Gilla Band’s mastery of dissonance. It’s their most methodical and charged album to date.
Not long after they formed in 2011, Gilla Band began experimenting with a bracing concoction of noise-punk and dance music. In 2013, they released “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage,” a cover of the post-dubstep single by English DJ Blawan. The original simmers for six minutes at a steady pace and decibel level; Gilla Band stretch it, torque it, and spike it with pedal-warped guitar that sounds more like a feat of extreme knob-wringing. Watching them perform it live is a study in tension and release, dynamics they wield like classical conductors or spring break DJs. Gilla Band withhold the drop for a torturous length of time, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of potential energy. Just before they kick up the volume and crash-land on the beat, they pull back to near silence, a single fret slide bridging the gap. It accounts for maybe one whole second, but that tiny bit of space is what sends limbs into motion.
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Gilla Band very pointedly understand their effect on the human body, whether it’s a squirm, a shudder, or a thrash. On their 2022 LP, Most Normal, they achieved a pitch of feedback so subtle and irritating that one fan removed it in his own personal remix of “The Weirds,” assuming it was a mistake. Even Kiely found the noise “disgusting,” as he put it in my 2023 conversation with the group. For Gilla Band, a visceral response is always a good sign, and on Pugnello they push for maximum discord. The queasy synth melody on stomper “The Megazord” has the pathetic timbre of dying electronics. “Three Hands Clapping” culminates in a snarl of Kiely’s vocal tracks, some plainspoken, others screaming into the void. Opener “The Angelus” is a battleground for Duggan Borges’ leviathan guitar and Faulkner’s breakneck 170 bpm percussion.
