Actually, it’s four guys who rock really hard
Just to be clear, Girl Band is the absolute, polar kind of terrifying opposite of whatever might pop into your head when you see the words “girl” and “band” strung together. The second coming of TLC, Girl Band is not.
The young Dublin foursome cut a merciless swath through the South by Southwest festival this past March. Imagine the Jesus Lizard or Mclusky or Pissed Jeans more mindful of groove yet given to a redlining ferocity that would make A Place to Bury Strangers blanch and you’ve an idea of what to expect from Girl Band’s two scheduled North by Northeast gigs, one set for the Garrison on Friday and another at the Drake Underground on Saturday.
The Star spoke to guitarist Alan Duggan.
Did you guys intentionally set out to make music this merciless and antisocial or is that just what came out when you started playing together?
It was, oddly, a bit of both. We knew what we didn’t want to be. So we kind of set out, like: “OK, we don’t wanna sound like that and we don’t wanna sound like that.” . . . I mean, all of us, we’re really, really pleasant guys and we’re really happy and stuff and, every now and again, we’re just kind of hangin’ out at practice or whatever, and we’ll sit down and listen back to it and not really understand what’s the connection. It’s some sort of weird, subconscious thing that’s coming out.
It can’t be easy thrashing it out like that night after night on the road.
I find it a lot easier now — and I’m only speaking for myself, personally — to really, really focus on the music and not worry about what’s going on. It is such aggressive music you can wind up getting quite exhausted by the end of it and just kind of confused as to why you’re that angry or whatever. . . . It’s really, really fun, though, which is the main thing.
The new Girl Band EP, The Early Years, is basically a singles compilation. Is there an actual full-length on the way soon?
It’s gonna be coming out in the fall . . . towards end-of-September/October time. We recorded it by ourselves with two guys who’ve helped us record all the other ones and Daniel (Fox, bassist) is an engineer so he knows actually how to work a desk and set up microphones and stuff like that. . . . We record everything live and you always want the recordings to capture what it’s like live, but there’s a lot to be said about actually being there and it being that loud. . . . We kind of messed around with a lot of different things. It was a long process, but it was a fun experience.