Two years almost to the day that self-released their debut album ‘Come And See’, they return with their second, ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’, this time on their now label home Play It Again Sam.
The Irish band have not stood still in the intervening years. Far from it, the growing crowds and anticipation for new music is a testament to the ethos of the quintet. A first listen through to ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’ highlighted a duality in its themes, shifting between fury and frustration, and intensely personal and introspective. The striking juxtaposition of the two is the backbone of this album.
Clash interviewed Dan Hoff (lead singer) and Mark MacCormack (guitarist) to learn more about the creation of their second album.
Following Gurriers self-released debut album ‘Come and See’, the second album ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’ will be released via your new label home, Play It Again Sam. How did you approach creating this second album? What was the main difference from the debut?
I think collectively we all wanted it to be a lot more expansive. I think the first album had what we wanted in that punk feeling, it felt like a band in their garage, you know, doing punk. This we wanted to be a bit more polished and also rough around the edges, but with a bit more light on production. I think we wanted to find more of a maturity to our music as well.
A band like Radiohead is a great example of the sonic template we wanted to follow in terms of progression. We all really admire bands and artists who’re always trying to reinvent themselves, even if it’s only a little bit record to record. David Bowie, Kanya West, you know, all these people who change in every album. They don’t repeat themselves.
Mark Bowen of IDLES was the producer. What did he bring to Gurriers for the second album?
Oh God, what didn’t he bring!
A lot of equipment to begin with! He had the whole Idles rig with him, which was really cool, especially as we were reaching for some of the more experimental stuff. He came with a really open mind and a big imagination. To be honest, he pitched to us to do the record. It wasn’t the other way around. I think we were a little bit conscious of: “fuck if we get him, is it just going to sound like Idles?”. He said he understood our concerns but it won’t be. I was really blown away by both him and Loren (Humphrey, producer), and Chris (Fullard) who was engineering the record. I thought they were just a great team, and they understood the vision and were really able to elevate it. I think it’s really important when you have good producers that they can come in and be a part of the band, but without taking over. There’s a really fine line. I think Bowen was really good at pushing us all, or giving us reassurance. He just understood it and was able to push us in all the right places.
Yeah, I think we all learned how to be better musicians in the studio because of Bowen and Loren and Chris, and just better musicians in general. Their brains are a treasure trove of talent and knowledge, and it’s great to be able to, for a certain amount of time, pick at their brains and watch them in their habitat. But I think with Bowen he was quite enthusiastic to the point that he made us excited. He’d ring me and Charlie and Mark and Ben and Pierce every now and again: “What do you think about this idea?” He made us really excited to try things. He’s a great producer, and I hope he gets his recognition for that.
The album comprises two extremes: on the one hand the fury and the frustration, and yet on the other intensely personal and self-deprecating in parts. Can you share a little about the themes?
I think a lot of it does stem from conversations with my partner Tori two or three years ago. We were talking about album two, and I was saying that I wanted to make album two not political. I wanted to write in a way where it’s not a political thing, and she said to me that everything is political. No matter what you do it is political, who you love, how you dress, how you eat, how you live, everything is political. It gave me this freedom to write about anything and it all intertwines. This is our most political album because in certain ways my self-deprecation and my mental health issues that I speak about in the songs, and my relationship with alcohol is personal, it’s my own. There’s no excuses for some of my issues, but at the same time it’s a governmental issue and a systemic issue in Ireland. I feel there isn’t the right facilities or infrastructure for mental health education or services. There is only the bare bones, and I know a lot of people who would agree with that. And I’m going through that myself in certain ways, and I’ve been very frustrated about the system. So the best thing I can do is write about it because I can’t just give out about it until the cows come home, you know. And I do find that it all links to politics because we’re all I guess, cogs in that machine.
It’s so striking. And also the stark contrast between songs in places on ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’. From the ferocious ‘Waiting for Fisher’ into the beautiful ‘I Wish I Was’, it takes the listener’s breath away.
When we were talking about the sequence of the album, we were almost approaching it like a film, how you cut scenes together. So the big dramatic opening with ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’, and then you get into the mid part of the album, with ‘Pins’ which is a very different song, and then a couple tracks later ‘Drones’, which I think is a radically different sound for us as a band. After ‘Drones’ we give you a couple more heavy songs, and then at the very end is these more softly spoken, dramatic pieces.
Which brings me nicely onto ‘Drones’. Personally it’s one of the highlights of the album. There’s that tetchy static at the start and what immediately came to mind was how drones have become weaponized. This extraordinary technology was created but is now associated with warfare. The song is epic in scale. Can you share how it came about, the creation of it.
The music came from Charlie (McCarthy, bassist). He had this bass patch that had this droning sound to it. We had it for a while and didn’t know what to do with it. And then funnily enough we were in Bristol on a day off on tour last October. And bear in mind, this is only maybe three weeks before we were going in to record the album. Dan had a family commitment at home, so he wasn’t with us. But Bowen very kindly had arranged for us to go into Idle’s practice room that day to write. We knew we needed another song for the album, and we needed something radically different. And Charlie had that bass patch, it was a really cool sound, but there wasn’t a song there, and we just said, “Fuck it, we just need to do something with this”. And to be honest almost the entire song, structurally anyway, from the four of us, just fell out, which I often find is how the best songs do come. They just happen.
We recorded a rough version and sent it to Dan, and over the course of the next three weeks, we pulled it together. And to be totally honest with you, you know how at the very end the song almost sounds like it’s disintegrating, and all the guitars are kind of warped, that was initially because we just kept fucking it up, well I kept fucking it up! But we were like, what if we make that part of the song and have the whole thing disintegrate? Bowen said this is actually way cooler than ending it properly. But yeah, musically anyway, it kind of just happened, but in Idle’s rehearsal room in Bristol, literally only three weeks before we went to record the album.
And Dan you then wrote the lyrics for ‘Drones’.
This is probably the most personal lyrically. I think it was interesting when you said about the militarization of drones, that was Charlie’s outlook for the song. He wanted to write about that, about drones and what’s happening all over the world in Gaza and Sudan and every other country that’s has military action. I was struggling with the melody for a while because I didn’t want it to follow too much of the music. I wanted there to be a counter melody. In the end we wrote the melody and the lyrics in pre-production with Bowen in our practice space in Dublin. There’s a book that I have called “Falling Feels Like Flying”, and I don’t know why but that completely influenced lyrics for ‘Drones’ and a bit of the lyrics for ‘Waiting for Fisher’ as well.
It felt like a very emotional, personal, self-deprecating song to me, sounding like something where it’s like I need to throw darts at a picture of myself for a while. It’s about having an undiagnosed autism or ADHD of some sorts, and my parents not noticing it when I was young, and I have to live with the repercussions during my adult life. It’s a bit of a difficult thing to talk about because I think a lot of my issues with mental health would stem from that undiagnosable thing, and there are other very personal lyrics in there that are quite close to the bone. The last line is about my father, and I wanted to put it in. I think Bowen wanted me to do a rant at the end of the song, something that was quite aggressive. He asked me “Do you have anything?” I said “I don’t” but I wanted to do it in the vocal booth at the time, so it’s completely authentic and it just comes off the top of the head. And I got it, and I was really happy with it. It’s interesting that you can pull it out of yourself sometimes, which I find really intriguing about the brain when you want to write lyrics.
Dan has this been a cathartic process for you putting this album together, bearing in mind everything that you’ve said.
It was definitely. The lads would probably say that as well. I wasn’t in a very good headspace making the album, so I ended up going onto antidepressants after it. I started taking them on the tour, and I’m quite open to talk about these things because I want to be able to break that stigma, that it is like a cold, it is like a flu. You can get better, and I dislike it when people act like there is a taboo against it. But it was worth it, and it was really important to make it, and I do think it helped.
‘Party Lines’ opens with a spoken dialogue and I wonder where that came from?
Charlie wanted some kind of speaker or a sample at the start. I went to one of my friends who is probably one of the smartest people I know. Katie is a CEO of an NGO in Ireland, so she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to politics and everything that’s happening around the world. I basically told her this is what the song’s about. She said: “Parenti, look up Parenti”, (Michael Parenti, an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic). She sent me these videos and he said that line, and I was like: “That’s perfect. That’s 100% it.” Because it’s incredibly thought provoking and says so much with so little words.
Moving on to playing live, you’ve a stacked schedule between now and the end of the year. Having the connection with Irish artists, bands like Enola Gay and more recently Madra Salach, how important is that community of Irish musicians to Gurriers? You seem to interact well and hold each other up?
I think it’s one of the most important things. Enola Gay gave us our biggest ever opportunity when we played in the UK for the first time. We played that show in Bristol at Rough Trade, and we ended up meeting our management and our team that we have to this day. We’re eternally grateful for that. We wouldn’t be where we are if it wasn’t for people like Joe and the lads. And I think it’s really important for Irish bands to unite and create a community for it to go on, you know, because it’s an amazing scene. It always has been, but it’s always felt it was a bit hidden away.
Yeah, look, I completely agree with Hoff. I think the community aspect of this music scene is fundamental to everyone’s success. Ireland’s a very small country, and there’s this running joke that when you meet another Irish person abroad, you simply can’t rest until you establish a connection. Like, I know Mary from Ballinasloe and you know her mother, or some shite like that! And it’s funny because when we go to festivals all over the world, you just run into other Irish bands and people look out for each other. The other day in Pukkelpop (Festival, Belgium), Dove Ellis was on right before us, and he operates in a totally different world to us, and immediately when he came off we said “deadly”. And he goes, “Are you Gurriers?”. You know everyone, and we all kind of look out for each other.
And with the bands supporting us at the end of the year, minus Child Of Prague, so Enola Gay, Tramhaus and really good time, they’re all bands who we opened for previously, and they’re all fucking amazing bands. And we thought it would be a really sick bill, regardless of whether it’s Tramhaus and Gurriers, Enola Gay and Gurriers, really good time and Gurriers, but also give these bands an opportunity, like they gave us opportunities in the past. Child Of Prague, who are a younger band, are really amazing, and I think them in the 3Olympia (Dublin) is a befitting venue for them as well.
One final question, how do Gurriers maintain a steady ship when you’re on tour for so long?
Mike, our tour manager, I have to say, he’s the captain of the ship. He gets us up in the morning and he drives us to every gig and he puts on a hell of a show. And then our own, you know, personal things where we need alone time. We’re quite open. To have other people around like Harley, our sound engineer, he’s an amazing human being who’s sound and funny. Then we have our management as well, who are a bit of craic. But you know, that’s another story! He’s good fun. That’s all I can say.
I love having Sean (manager) in the band. He’s just a wind-up merchant.
I think for this tour, I’m going to be a little bit more healthy. I think I need to use the gyms and use my time to get healthier, so I don’t feel like a bag of spuds, just fucking dead in the van because it’s tiring. It’s a proper workout every day, and then you’re wondering why you’re tired, you know.
I mean, you give so much in your gigs night after night, self care is important. Being based in Scotland I’ll see Gurriers at both SWG3 (Glasgow) and The Caves (Edinburgh, album launch outstore).
I’m not even just saying this. We fucking love going to Scotland. We never get to spend enough time there. One time we drove directly from Brighton to Glasgow. You literally couldn’t get two more polar opposites, and then it was right gigs done, back in the van. I’m like: “but I didn’t even get my battered Mars Bar!” Do you know what I mean? And the crowds are amazing.
It has been fantastic to see the younger generation loving Gurriers. The whole energy in the room has shifted and it is phenomenal.
Actually that’s a big thing we’ve noticed and it’s something we’ve really been conscious of and happy about, seeing the shows are far more diverse in age and gender. A gig is like real life. It’s more interesting with a large variety of people. For example, a lot more young women now feel they can come and feel safe, and they can go into a mosh pit, and they don’t feel like something bad’s going to happen to them. More and more young people can engage with the live show in an energetic way, and not feel: “oh, I have to watch out for myself here”. Look obviously you’ve seen us. We’re big on encouraging a bit of madness, but never to the point where someone could get hurt.
‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’ is out now. Catch Gurriers on tour this Autumn.