Gilla Band: Pugnello review – furious originality fuelled by cathartic aggression and absurdist confessions

Gilla Band have attracted some impressive plaudits since announcing their fourth album this summer. A feature in Pitchfork heralding its arrival described them as “Ireland’s most influential band since My Bloody Valentine”. Should any readers feel this was a classic example of music journalism hyperbole, it was followed up with a succession of quotes from the Dublin quartet’s musical peers, all eager to attest to their importance, originality and impact. One of them, Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez – one half of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls – went so far as to say precisely the kind of thing about Gilla Band that people said about My Bloody Valentine 35 years ago: “They basically reinvented guitar music.”

Under the circumstances, there’s something faintly disappointing about the fact that Pugnello opens with a very prosaic and familiar sound indeed: that of someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar. But then something disconcertingly odd happens. The power chord doesn’t fade away. It just … keeps going, for the best part of two and 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 that they appear to be played live on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares. The drone is eventually replaced by a series of 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.

Indeed, the sense of WTF? doesn’t abate until Pugnello finally draws to a close 42 minutes later. In the interim, the listener is confronted with the kind of 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 very much 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, and boggling at the idea that it’s actually supposed to sound like that.

Gilla Band’s is a resolutely contemporary sound, glitching and juddering like a faulty signal, less interested in melody than it is 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.

Meanwhile, 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.

This week Alexis listened to

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – I See a Darkness (Live in the City of Ghosts)
Some gentle respite from the album of the week: the old BPB classic beautifully reimagined on his album Ghosts of American Psychonauts.