Gurriers

Brudenell Presents...

With support from - Tramhaus

When Dublin’s Gurriers released 2024 debut album Come And See, they underlined their status as a visceral, unignorable new voice in the thriving Irish punk scene. Having formed during the pandemic, in the years since, the original members - vocalist Dan Hoff, guitarists Ben O'Neill and Mark MacCormack and drummer Pierce Callaghan - had carved out a steadily escalating reputation for bone-rattling, mosh-ready live shows. Come And See pushed their lyrical chops and curious, socially-exploratory outlook to the fore too, platforming songs about digital angst and IRL terror in the modern world.
In the months following its release, the milestones kept coming for the band: a slot on Later with Jools Holland; main stage performances in the Woodsies and Leftfield tents at Glastonbury; an arena support back in their hometown with Turnstile and with Kneecap at Wembley. With bassist Charlie McCarthy now fully settled into the throng, bringing a fresh burst of enthusiasm having joined the band at the beginning of 2024 - sometime after their debut had been recorded and before it was released that September, they found the new music they were starting to pen was innately reflective of this vast step up in their ante.
“You write songs for the environment that you’ll hear them in, so when we were playing small, 250 capacity rooms then [we wrote] a sweaty punk record,” Callaghan reflects of their debut. “But now, playing bigger festival stages and supporting in arenas, it changes how you approach songwriting. You’re thinking about what sort of environment these songs are gonna be heard in, and how they’ll exist in that space.”
Gurriers’ superb second album might be called Nobody’s Coming To Save You, then, but it could easily be subtitled ‘harder, better, faster, stronger’. Recorded at Donegal’s Attica Studios and Holy Mountain Studios in London with producers Mark Bowen of Idles and Loren Humphrey (Geese, Cameron Winter), alongside engineer Chris Fullard (Idles, Sunn O))) and world-renowned mixer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Modest Mouse, Swans), the crack team that readily assembled for LP2 speaks volumes of its quality from the off. This is Gurriers taking all the musical chemistry and smart, interrogational worldview that made them great in the first place, and souping it up to the next level.
“I just felt like it needed to be bigger. I was watching loads of interviews with Butch Vig and different grunge bands, and [they would talk about having] layers and layers of guitars; about things being huge and really 3D and just slapping you in the face,” says O’Neill. “These songs are bombastic and larger than life a lot of the time, so the production needed to match with that as well.”
They were, clearly, in safe hands. “I mean, who’s going to understand the music we make more than someone in Idles, the band we’re probably equated with the most?” laughs Callaghan. “Between Bowen and Loren, their understanding of…