Gilla Band's fourth album, Pugnello, is a thrilling and relentless 42 minutes of monstrous noise whose precise instrumental source always remains discomfitingly unclear. The Dublin quartet have attracted impressive plaudits since announcing the record this summer, with a Pitchfork feature describing them as “Ireland’s most influential band since My Bloody Valentine”. Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls went further, saying: “They basically reinvented guitar music.”
An Unsettling Opening
Despite the hype, Pugnello opens with a very prosaic and familiar sound: someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar. But then something disconcertingly odd happens – the chord doesn’t fade away. It just keeps going for the best part of two and a half minutes. That grinding drone underpins a track called The Angelus, punctuated by frantic bursts of warp-speed rhythm that would sound like drum'n'bass breakbeats were it not for the fact they appear to be played live on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares. The drone is eventually replaced by ferocious, shuddering bass explosions, overlaid with a sound that could theoretically be feedback but most evokes a dial-up modem.
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 – “his close friends get to call him TC” – and the kids' TV show Bananas in Pyjamas. The sense of WTF? is overwhelming.
Contemporary Texture Over Melody
The sense of WTF? doesn't abate until Pugnello finally draws to a close 42 minutes later. The listener is confronted with music that leaves you casting about for something to compare it to and coming up with only the vaguest suggestions – not a regular occurrence when dealing with alternative rock in 2026, which tends to wear its influences on its sleeve. You can see why people keep mentioning My Bloody Valentine in relation to Gilla Band – the contents of Pugnello certainly invoke the jarring, exhilarating experience of hearing Loveless or the Tremolo EP in 1991.
Gilla Band's is a resolutely contemporary sound, glitching and juddering like a faulty signal, less interested in melody than in texture. There's nothing in the way of a hummable tune: Pugnello's 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's racing heartbeat pulse is disrupted by blasts of atonal guitar. The album's 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's monstrous distorted bass line, the machine rhythms of The Megazord and especially Alogia, where a particularly urgent brand of funk is overlaid with blaring klaxon-like tones.
Confessional Lyrics and Comparisons
If your vocal style involves barking out a stream of spoken word lyrics at turns acerbic and absurd, you're inevitably going to get compared to the Fall, and so it proves. There's a definite hint of Mark E Smith about some of Kiely's cadences and indeed about his way with a put-down: “I'm injecting a lethal amount of nothing,” he sings on Placeholder, “I'm blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay.” But abstract as they are, you can't miss a certain confessional cast to Kiely's lyrics, which frequently touch on both the singer's mental health – he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia – and his fractured relationship with his late father. Amid the torrent of imagery he spews forth on Jacobsons, there's an affecting depiction of trying and failing to summon the requisite emotions around his dad's death: “I should,” he bellows frantically, “be more sad”.
Clearly, Pugnello is the dictionary definition of “not for everyone”, 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 – and thrillingly – out on their own.
