Why we had to escape our comfort zone
Super ambitious NewDad are going places… in more ways than one!
A‘We can talk about people who are right in front of us on the Tube in London’
n internet band name generator might have given NewDad their moniker but there is nothing random about the Galway band’s ascent. For more than five years the quartet have diligently honed a sound that recalls The Cure and groups associated with the Nineties ‘shoegaze’ subgenre of alternative rock music. British bands of the era such as Lush, Chapterhouse and Slowdive often preferred to look to the floor rather than the audience, perceived as too diffident to meet the audience’s eyes. More often the members downstage were contemplating the series of guitar effects that gave them the layered sound that accompanied their introspective lyrics. See also Irish icons My Bloody Valentine.
NewDad attest to all those influences but they have found their own sound on their mightily impressive debut album, Madra. The title is a nod to their belief in the promotion of the Irish language.
‘We all went to Gaelscoileanna and did our Junior Certs through Irish. We still have a fair bit of it,’ singer-guitarist Julie Dawson says.
‘If maths and English are still mandatory so should Irish be,’ says drummer Fiachra Parslow reflecting an ongoing debate of whether learning Irish at school should remain compulsory in a changing Ireland.
‘How many people do you hear say, “I wish I could speak Irish; I wish I had listened in school?” Even though children might not want to do it because it’s boring or the teacher is a bit weird, I promise that when they are older they will be thankful to get the base knowledge.’
‘We can talk about people who are right in front of us when we are on the Tube in London,’ lead guitarist Seán O’Dowd laughs.
The band moved there after a live grounding in venues such as Seven and Róisín Dubh in Galway. They and bassist Cara Joshi, the last to join the band, felt that only in London could their ambitions be fulfilled.
‘There is a saying about Galway: “Galway is the graveyard of ambition”,’ Seán says. ‘Galway is just so nice, so chill. You could get so comfortable doing nothing and that happens to a lot of people who have high hopes.’
‘When we thought about leaving Galway, it was either Dublin or London and it costs the same to live in both,’ Fiachra says.
‘When you grow up in Galway you know everyone there,’ Julie says. ‘But we miss it a lot now living in London. Whenever we go back we see how beautiful it is.’
Galway is arguably the city most associated with the arts in this country. But asking New Dad to expand on the notion that it is where ‘ambition goes to die’, I wondered did they feel that having ambitions of commercial success on a global scale, as they admit to, might be perceived as almost vulgar there.
‘Yes, literally. People would be like, “Who do you think you are?” We still retain feelings like that,’ Julie says.
‘When something good or significant happens, we think “…but we’re from Galway!” It’s silly to let where you’re from define you. We’d even be embarrassed bringing our instruments into school – “Ooh, look at you with the guitar on your back!”’
‘The worst thing that you could have said about you is that you had notions,’ Seán says.
Unlike Sprints, Fontaines DC, The Murder Capital and Pillow Queens, NewDad signed to a major label (Atlantic) and had little compunction about doing so.
‘We were so ambitious that we wanted to be with a label that could help us achieve that,’ Julie says.
Fiachra says: ‘It didn’t boil down to indie versus major, it boiled down to who would give us…’
‘The most money!’ Julie shouts and they all laugh.
Fiachra undeterred continues, ‘We were always going to go with whoever was going to put in the most effort into making this album as good as we wanted it to be.’
‘Yes,’ Julie says as we close our chat ‘and also because we want to be bigger than The Weeknd and Ed Sheeran’.
NewDad’s Madra is out now. Go to newdad.live for upcoming shows.