Gilla Band

Four from Dublin, and a name that had to go

Gilla Band formed in Dublin in July 2011 as Girl Band: Dara Kiely on vocals, Alan Duggan on guitar, Daniel Fox on bass and Adam Faulkner on drums. Kiely, Duggan and Fox already knew each other's playing, having been in an indie group called Harrows together at secondary school. The original name came out of a joke about a woman they had met in a bar and her taste in music, which is roughly the amount of thought that goes into most band names at nineteen and roughly the amount of trouble it eventually caused.

The first single, In My Head, arrived in April 2012 on Any Other City Records. A self-produced EP, France 98, and a cover of a Blawan track followed, and the records travelled further than the band did, building an audience in Ireland and then across the UK. Geoff Travis watched them play several times before signing them to Rough Trade in December 2014, which remains their label.

In November 2021 they became Gilla Band. The stated reason was blunt: the old name misgendered them and promoted non-inclusivity. The change cost them a decade of search-engine history and a certain amount of recognition, and they made it anyway.

Three albums, and the gap in the middle

Holding Hands with Jamie came out in September 2015 and did the thing debut albums are supposed to do — it put them on festival bills and in the conversation. What followed was less orderly. Health issues within the band forced a hiatus, and the touring cycle that should have carried the record stalled.

They returned in 2019 with The Talkies, a record defined by heavily processed, effects-laden guitar work that pushed further from anything resembling conventional rock instrumentation. Most Normal followed in October 2022, after which the band undertook their first full tour of the United States — a market that had been largely theoretical for them up to that point.

The influences they name are not obscure: The Fall, the Modern Lovers, the Beatles, Nirvana, Nick Cave, LCD Soundsystem. The traffic has gone the other way too. Fontaines D.C., Idles and Dry Cleaning all sit downstream of what Gilla Band did with guitars and rhythm between 2015 and 2019, which is part of why a band of this size gets written about with the seriousness usually reserved for much larger acts.

Pugnello: the record they came back with

Pugnello was released on 25 September 2026 on Rough Trade, produced by bassist Daniel Fox. It runs ten tracks, opening with The Angelus and closing with At the Gallop, taking in Placeholder, Alogia, Three Hands Clapping, Jacobsons, The Megazord, Computer Sadness, Giraffe and Crisp Pop on the way.

The sonic spine of it is an Erica Synths Perkons drum machine, which the band used to strip their method back to root materials rather than layer more on top. The subject matter is harder. Kiely wrote through the death of his father and through his own schizophrenia diagnosis, the latter addressed directly on Alogia. He has been consistent about refusing to let any of that turn solemn: as he put it, adding a bit of silly makes it sound more human.

The reception has been strong and specific rather than merely warm. Writing in the Irish Times, Ed Power called it a magnificently unhinged fourth album, as immediate as a headbutt and as loud and brutal as a jackhammer, and described it as the most coherently punishing record the band have released — an endurance test that pays out in what he called diamonds in a void of howling, screeching anti-pop. He placed them as the most revolutionary force at work in Irish music. DIY gave it four and a half stars and called it their fiercest, most ruminative release to date, an eerie and grinding excavation of reflection, grief, distraction and childhood.

Breaking a four-year silence

The re-entry point was Giraffe, the band's first new material since a standalone single, Sports Day, in 2023. Rough Trade put it out as a limited 7in picture disc. Kiely's account of the lyric is characteristically unguarded: the first few sections, he said, represent what his general headspace is like, scattered and sometimes lonely, while the outro indirectly amounts to a confirmation that affection towards him does exist, expressed through an image of maternal care he describes as distinctly Irish.

Announced alongside the single was the largest touring commitment of their career to date — a headline run across North America, Europe and the UK stretching from October 2026 into February 2027, taking in New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin. Songkick currently lists 40 upcoming events across the run, with more than 30,000 users tracking the band on the platform.

Where the tour stands in October 2026

The North American leg is under way. The band played the Hall at Elsewhere in Bushwick, Brooklyn on 15 October 2026 with PISS opening, a 16-plus show with doors at 7pm and tickets at a $25 face value. From there the run moves through Théâtre Fairmount in Montreal on 19 October, Lee's Palace in Toronto on 20 October, Third Man Records in Detroit on 21 October, the Bottom Lounge in Chicago on 23 October and the Turf Club in St Paul on 24 October, continuing west before the European and UK dates pick up into 2027.

The venue choices tell their own story. These are 300- to 700-capacity rooms, not theatres. A band whose records get five-star notices in national newspapers is still playing club stages, and the physical character of the show is a large part of why that works.

What the set does to a room

Their festival set at All Together Now on Saturday 2 August 2026, at Curraghmore Estate in Co Waterford, was reviewed in the Irish Times and gives the clearest recent picture of the staging. The four of them played as silhouettes against a red backdrop with their faces largely obscured, no introductions and no banter at any point, while illegible script and spreading ink-like stains strobed across the screen behind them. The reviewer described industrial, claustrophobic music that envelops the listener with richness and darkness, with songs advancing through repetition with the inexorable logic of a nightmare. Post Ryan, Lawman and Eight Fivers all featured, and one track turned the field into a pogoing, surging mosh pit. The verdict was three and a half stars, with the caveat that some of the then-unreleased Pugnello material lacked the clarity of their best work and tipped into repetition — a fair warning, and one the finished album has largely answered.

The club shows run hotter. Far Out's review of a December 2023 date in the Pink Room at YES in Manchester tracked a crowd that began almost motionless, with a decisive lack of head-banging or even casual foot-tapping, and ended with the front of the room a free-for-all once Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage arrived. Backwash, Eight Fivers, Going Norway and Umbongo also made the set. The reviewer's closing line gets at the thing that separates this band from their imitators: few bands could make chants of petit pois and Nutella sound so good.