Gilla Band release their fourth album Pugnello, out now. Their latest offering was recorded between 2022-2026 across three studios, Hellfire, Yellow Door Music Studio, & Sonic Studios in Dublin, and produced by Gilla Band and recorded and mixed by Daniel Fox. The album is available on Deluxe Gatefold LP with glued in lyric booklet + pearl colour vinyl + indie colour LP, and Standard LP & CD.
Gilla Band never know where they’re going next. For over ten years now, the Dublin quartet — vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox, and drummer Adam Faulkner — have been redefining what you could loosely call “rock music” in the 21st century, influencing a wide swath of similarly forward-thinking guitar acts along the way. Across 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, 2019’s The Talkies, and 2022’s Most Normal, the band perfected a vision that wasn’t quite post-punk, wasn’t quite noise-rock, wasn’t quite anything besides an idiosyncratic, ground-breaking hybrid that could only come from the four of them. As soon as they submitted Most Normal for mastering, they began the patient search for their next destination. Over time, the process led them to their fourth album Pugnello, the boldest left turn in a career full of them.
Every Gilla Band album ends up with a certain array of defining sounds, and for Pugnello it is the Erica Synths Perkons drum machine the band acquired in 2022. It allowed the group to forge deeper into a new songwriting approach first established for Most Normal. Where all their earlier material required all four members jamming in the room, now they had unlocked a way in which songs could evolve as long as any two members were present. “The drum machine became a really good writing tool, and songs just started happening,” Fox recalls. “You’d be a fucking idiot to stop yourself in the middle of that.” For years, the band sifted through ideas — abandoning demos, breaking pieces off of one song and stitching them on to another — until a final six month sprint in which Pugnello cohered.
The first breakthrough arrived with ‘Jacobsons’, the song destined to be Pugnello’s bracing centerpiece. Built on a simple, unrelenting pattern of kick and snare, the spartan and uncompromising nature of the song proved liberating — and directional. Gilla Band’s long-standing influence from techno music moved from backdrop to forefront, as the drum machine led them to craft their own sideways versions of dance tracks, experiment with caustic electronic textures, and twist familiar elements of their sound under new lights. As The Talkies was to Holding Hands With Jamie, so too does Pugnello exist in symbiosis with Most Normal. It is the darker, heavier older brother, the band wielding all the lessons learned on its predecessor to create an aesthetic both haunting and propulsive, carrying Kiely through some of the most complex emotional territory he’s ever traversed on a Gilla Band album.
“With every album, I try to document the events of my life since the last one,” Kiely explains. On Pugnello, he grapples with the loss of his estranged father and parses snapshots of a fragmented childhood. The album’s headspace is one of living grief, in which stray recollections, the comfort of nostalgia, adopted father figures, and fictional conversations mingle freely. It’s an evolution of Kiely’s old surrealist style, fusing hilarious non-sequiturs with viscerally confessional fourth-wall breaks. Across the album, Kiely navigates the haze of grief and mortality, cataloguing a mind flitting through the years before finding its way back to balance.
“I wanted to make a positive out of a negative,” he explains. “Bleak and dark material can be explored and something beautiful can be found in the grey of it all. You get through things, not over them.”
Even with their long history of experimentation, Pugnello finds Gilla Band in uncharted territory, venturing to places thematically and creatively they could only visit after the trust and intuition built through years of making art together. Pugnello — at once accessible and challenging, horrifying and beautiful — is a culmination of four friends pushing further and further. “A lot of times bands get further down the road and grow comfortable in their execution,” Fox concludes. “We’re still hungry for experience, for new things. I don’t think we could’ve made this album before. It took all of us learning together, all of the time.”
Purchase / Stream Pugnello here.
