Fresh off a run of European dates with IDLES, Ireland’s Gilla Band are pleased to announce their new album Most Normal to be released on Rough Trade Records on October 7, 2022. They are sharing the first single “Eight Fivers” and an accompanying video directed and animated by Mortis Studios with additional help from Ruben Hernandez. Most Normal is the band’s third album; it was self-produced and recorded and mixed by Gilla Band’s bassist Daniel Fox at Sonic Studios and their rehearsal place. The album will be available on limited-edition blue vinyl and a limited edition alternate cover with white vinyl. Pre-order is available here.

“Eight Fivers” announces itself in the typical Gilla Band way, where the lyrics often feel abstracted from the music. Singer Dara Kiely’s voice sounds like it is being pulled by two opposing forces, it’s a melodic cry yearning and dancing over the song’s driving beat. Kiely says of the track, “Eight Fivers is about being out of touch with modern circumstances while feeling socially limited. Never fitting in and kind of proud of it. Stuck with what I have and happy with it. Being grateful and not fashionable, self-conscious and too aware of what is lacking. Accepting that jealousy has played a big role in my life but trying not to feed into it.” 

For their first album as Gilla Band, the foursome has redrawn their own paradigm. Most Normal is like little you’ve heard before, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of noise put in service of broken pop songs, FX-strafed Avant-punk rollercoaster rides, and passages of futurist dancefloor nihilism.

Covid lockdown robbed Gilla Band of any opportunity to try the new material out live, but the pandemic also incinerated any idea of a deadline for the new album. They were free to tinker at leisure, to rewrite and restructure and reinvent tracks they’d cut – to, as drummer Adam Faulkner puts it, “pull things apart and be like, ‘Let’s try this. We could try out every wild idea.” 

The group also fell under the spell of modern hip-hop, “where there’s really heavy-handed production and they’re messing with the track the whole time,” says basses Daniel Fox. “That felt like a fun route to go down, it was a definite influence.”

The common thread holding Most Normal’s ambitious avant-pop shapes together is frontman Dara Kiely. Throughout, he’s an antic, antagonistic presence, barking wild, hilarious, unsettling spiels, babbling about smearing fish with lubricant or dressing up in bin-liners or having to wear hand-me-down boot-cut jeans.