Basht.

Rathmines, and a support slot that changed the maths

Basht. came together in Dublin around 2021 and the band's own listings still place them in Rathmines, on the south side of the city. Frontman Jack Leavey's route in was ordinary enough: his first gig was The Coronas at the Olympia aged ten, taken by his mother, and the first record he bought with his own money was the Kings of Leon album 'Aha Shake Heartbreak' on CD. The reference points he gives for his writing are Lou Reed, Paul Banks, Ian Curtis, Anton Newcombe and early Kings of Leon; the band's wider list adds Interpol, Pixies, Television, The Velvet Underground, Fontaines D.C. and Wunderhorse.

That last name turned out to be literal. In 2023 Basht. supported Wunderhorse across the UK and Ireland, which moved them out of Dublin's pub circuit and into rooms where nobody knew the songs. The same year they shared stages with Bdrmm and the Goo Goo Dolls, played Electric Picnic, All Together Now and Brighton's Mutations, and sold out two London headline shows for Communion, at the Sebright Arms and The Social. The band talk about Fontaines D.C. having made a wave that acts like them, and contemporaries such as Brooki and Bleech 9:3, have been able to travel on.

Press accounts of the line-up have varied over the past two years. The album-cycle coverage names Leavey on vocals and guitar, Lughaidh Armstrong-Mayock on lead guitar, Louis Christle on bass and Ryan McClelland on drums.

'Dirty White Lies', recorded on a day off

The first proper record was made in the gaps of the Wunderhorse tour. Basht. tracked the 'Dirty White Lies' EP in Newcastle in the summer of 2023 with Thom Lewis, who had worked with Sam Fender and The Staves, during a break in the touring schedule. It came out in 2024 through Our House, the label home of Freak Slug, ELI and OhEm, and carried songs including 'Never Love', 'Gone Girl', 'Tomorrow.' and '456.' Spotify playlisting followed on Hot New Bands, Melomania and Proper Belters.

What the EP bought them was a first headline tour of the UK and Ireland that sold out, plus a support run with Dead Letter. The festival work through 2024 included a headline slot at O'Hara's Big Top at the Carlow Arts Festival on Saturday 8 June. By the start of 2025 they were selling their own Dublin shows: Whelan's on Friday 4 April 2025, tickets at €15.55 before fees, on sale from 31 January.

Speaking to RTÉ around that period, Leavey described the band's music as sitting between classic rock and modern alternative rock, which undersells where the writing went next but is a fair account of the EP.

Ali Chant, a church in Rush, and a concept nobody planned

'Poor Advice' was produced by Ali Chant, whose credits include Dry Cleaning, The Murder Capital, Sorry and PJ Harvey. Leavey has credited Chant's approach with letting the band write without second-guessing and record without pressure. The album was written while they were on the road, through UK and European touring and their first US shows, which the band say pushed the record along faster than it might otherwise have gone. 'Circadia' was written on a tour supporting Miles Kane.

The subject matter is Ireland's long entanglement of church and state, and what institutional authority does to the people raised inside it: guilt, silence, obedience, and the business of breaking out. Leavey says the concept was not the plan, that they simply started writing and he found himself going down rabbit holes; Christle has been blunter, calling it a fairly heavy listening experience. The ten tracks include 'Dive', 'Keira Knightley', 'Superchurch', 'Circadia', 'Vermilion Reptilian', 'Kids Vs Guns', 'Terror TV', 'Perfume', 'Moth' and the closing title track. 'Perfume' was the first single, with a video; 'Terror TV' picked up BBC Radio 1 airplay.

The visual side was handled by creative director Pol Ocho, who shot the artwork in a church in Rush, north County Dublin, using a Dublin actor named Harley. The band's stated common ground when writing stretched well outside guitar music — Portishead, Massive Attack and Mazzy Star — while Leavey has pointed to MJ Lenderman's 'Manning Fireworks' as something he kept returning to. Asked about writing material that might be too personal, his answer was that the thought does not really occur to him, and that what matters is whether it is honest.

Where they stand this week

The reviews landed on 8 October 2026, a day before release. The Soundboard called the album one of the top post-punk breakouts of 2026 and reached for U2's 'October' as a comparison, on the grounds that both records pick at the place faith occupies in Irish life; the same review described the production as a deliberately cold, brittle listen that strips out atmospheric warmth, and named 'Terror TV' as the one track that falls back on conventional motorik post-punk. Silent Radio was positive on much the same terms, praising an album that demands to be questioned as much as heard while noting that some mid-album tracks blur into one another instrumentally.

The touring behind it has been close to continuous. A UK headline tour ran from February to May 2026, taking in King Tut's in Glasgow on 8 April, The Bodega in Nottingham on 11 April and Moth Club in London on 17 April, with a Paris date at Les Étoiles on 27 May. The summer was festivals: TRNSMT, Wilderness, Boardmasters, Reading and Leeds, Bearded Theory, Rock Werchter and Rock N Roll Circus in Sheffield, plus Neighbourhood Festival in Manchester.

Release week itself is being spent in record shops — Rough Trade East on 9 October, Resident in Brighton on 10 October, Rough Trade Bristol on 11 October, Rough Trade Nottingham on 12 October and Jacaranda Baltic in Liverpool on 13 October — before Mutations in Brighton on 23 October. The seven ticketed headline shows run from Castle & Falcon in Birmingham on 18 October and Independent in Sunderland on 20 October into Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on 27 October, Glasgow's Art School on 28 October, Gorilla in Manchester on 29 October, KOKO in London on 30 October and the Button Factory in Dublin on 7 November. Tickets have been going at around £17.60 and up, with the band's own account of the autumn run being that very few remain. On what comes after, Leavey's line is that they have no idea, and that this is the enjoyable part.

On stage

The live show has been running ahead of the records for most of a year. Through the spring tour the band were playing six or seven unreleased album tracks a night to rooms that had only the EP to go on, and the reviews kept noting that the new material was the part people remembered. Leavey works the crowd directly rather than through patter — at the Amersham Arms in New Cross on 4 August he turned the audience's clapping into part of a chorus, with the instruction to see them move.

Nothing about the staging is elaborate. Reviewers describe a band that walks on to cheers and starts playing without introductions, four players and a hard, percussive sound, and audiences with hands up by the second song. Mosh pits and crowd surfers have been standard: at King Tut's one surfer was carried out around the midpoint.