Chalk

Two film students and a Gilla Band poster

Cullen and Goddard met as film students in Belfast, and the introduction came via a poster: Goddard noticed a Gilla Band print in the background of Cullen's Instagram and got in touch. The first gig the pair played together went out under a different name, to about fifty people in Cullen's flat. Chalk as it exists now dates to 2021, when the two moved in together and the project stopped being a side interest. The debut EP was written and released before they had played a proper show.

The band's material keeps circling back to where it was made. Cullen grew up with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother; Goddard has an English parent and an Irish one. Belfast's club scene did the rest of the work: a promoter's description of the city's sound as "trauma techno" stuck with the band, along with the comparison it implied to Berlin, another city where historical damage fed into hard electronic music. Speaking to Rolling Stone UK in March 2024, Cullen put it plainly: "If Chalk was a Dublin project, I don't know where it would have ended up."

The Conditions trilogy

Rather than rush an album, Chalk released three EPs over three years — Conditions in 2023, Conditions II in 2024 on Nice Swan Records, and Conditions III in 2025 — thirteen tracks in total that track the shift from guitar-led post-punk towards something closer to a rave set. Producer Chris W Ryan pushed the electronics forward; Goddard has credited him with bringing in elements the band had not thought to reach for.

The live work built alongside it. Chalk played Reading Festival in 2023 and took support slots with Sprints, And So I Watch You From Afar, Idles and Fontaines D.C. before a Glastonbury booking in 2025. The line-up changed in 2025 when drummer Luke Niblock left; Fiontan MacAleavey took the stool for touring. Two singles arrived that year, 'Pain' and 'Can't Feel It', the latter on 25 October 2025 with the announcement of the band's biggest headline tour to that point. Cullen described the song as a dance track about the highs and lows of being young, written around a secret first kiss with a friend. A first American run followed in November 2025, together with a 28-minute session for KEXP.

Crystalpunk, written as if there would be no second one

The debut album landed on 13 March 2026 through ALTER Music, produced by Cullen and Chris W Ryan at Attica Audio and mastered by Chris Gehringer. Before writing it the band drew up a manifesto with a single governing rule: this is the only Chalk album that will ever exist. The intention was to remove the safety of a second attempt.

The record opens with 'Tongue', pulls stadium-sized guitar into 'Longer', and works through loss on 'Ache' and 'Can't Feel It'. Its centre of gravity is 'Béal Feirste', an eight-minute penultimate track named with the Irish for Belfast, addressing the city's electronic scene and the divisions that sit underneath it. The word crystalpunk was the band's own coinage, an umbrella they invented because nothing existing covered both halves of what they do.

Reviews were strong: an aggregate score of 83 on Metacritic, five stars from Dork, and a description from NME of "a knockout collection of arresting dance-punk". When The Horn Blows called it "a tear-stained triumph" on 12 March 2026. The Guardian put it in its best-of-the-year-so-far list in June 2026, picking out 'Béal Feirste' and 'Can't Feel It' and calling the album an instant industrial-pop classic. It reached No.1 on the UK Dance Albums Chart, No.13 on the UK Independent Albums Chart, No.19 on the vinyl chart and No.30 on the UK album sales chart.

Where the band stands in September 2026

The headline tour announced in October 2025 ran from Brussels on 10 April 2026 through London's Electric Ballroom on 23 April, Manchester's Gorilla on 24 April and Dublin's Button Factory on 15 May, finishing with a sold-out homecoming at Belfast's Limelight in May in front of around 700 people. In between, the band played SXSW in Austin in March 2026.

The step up came on 28 August 2026, when Fontaines D.C. announced a 19-date European arena tour with Chalk supporting throughout. It opens at the MEO Arena in Lisbon on 21 October and closes at London's O2 on 27 November, taking in Liverpool's M&S Bank Arena on 20 November, Manchester's AO Arena on 21 November, Glasgow's OVO Hydro on 22 November, Leeds First Direct Arena on 24 November and Birmingham's Utilita Arena on 25 November. Presales opened on 1 September and general sale on 3 September. The run supports Fontaines D.C.'s album Dopamine Chamber, out 16 October on XL.

Before that, Chalk close the free evening showcase at Output Belfast on 24 September 2026, headlining across the Cathedral Quarter with a DJ set to finish the night. The line-up, announced on 13 September, runs from 7.30pm to 2am across venues including Bullitt, the Oh Yeah Music Centre and the Ulster Sports Club, with more than thirty acts playing.

What the set actually does

The early template was set at the Black Box in Belfast on 19 May 2023, reviewed by Dig With It: three musicians in black, the venue's usual colour washes dropped for near-total darkness and heavy strobe, EDM breakdowns cut with discord, a guest saxophone part from a player named Ciaran, and a drop into something fragile in the middle of the set before the hardness returned.

By the American debut the shape had tightened. At Holocene in Portland on 9 November 2025 the trio played sixteen songs in roughly an hour, opening with 'Leipzig 87' and ending on 'Conditions', with the Portland six-piece House of Warmth opening. The Portland Mercury noted how little the band spoke between songs — a deliberate choice that keeps the thing running like a film rather than a gig — and how hard MacAleavey's drumming hit; the crowd chanted for an encore.

The Limelight homecoming in May 2026 was reviewed by Chris Mullan for Blowtorch Records as a coronation rather than a gig. It opened with 'Tongue', ran the whole of Crystalpunk, pulled highlights from the Conditions EPs and gave 'Get Fucked' its live debut. The 700-capacity room held punks, metallers, indie kids, older ravers and parents; pits opened without prompting, and the encore was demanded with chants of "Olé, Olé, Olé".