Gilla Band have been collecting outsize praise since announcing their fourth album this summer. Pitchfork called them Ireland's most influential band since My Bloody Valentine. Lambrini Girls' Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez said they 'basically reinvented guitar music.' These are the kinds of claims that tend to curdle on contact with the actual record. Pugnello, to its considerable credit, does not curdle. The album opens with a power chord — prosaic, familiar — and then refuses to stop. For nearly two and a half minutes, that grinding drone just holds, underpinning a track called The Angelus, cut through with what sounds like live drum-kit snare breakbeats played at drum'n'bass speeds. When the drone finally gives way, it's to ferocious bass explosions and a sound that resembles dial-up modem feedback. Frontman Dara Kiely talks over all of it — anguished one moment, referencing Top Cat and Bananas in Pyjamas the next. The WTF feeling this generates doesn't lift for the remaining 40 minutes. The My Bloody Valentine comparison is inexact but not dishonest. What Pugnello actually shares with Loveless or the Tremolo EP is the experience of hearing something and genuinely not knowing whether it's supposed to sound like that — that specific disorientation of encountering music that doesn't seem to care whether you're following it. But Gilla Band's closest musical relatives are arguably not in alt-rock at all. The punishing, industrial-flecked techno of Regis and Surgeon is a more honest reference. You hear it in Placeholder's monstrous distorted bass, in the machine rhythms of The Megazord, and especially in Alogia, where funk urgency gets buried under klaxon tones. Kiely's vocals invite the Fall comparison that he's obviously going to get — and it's not wrong. There's Mark E Smith in his cadences and in lines like 'I'm injecting a lethal amount of nothing / I'm blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay.' But the confessional thread running beneath the absurdism is distinctly Kiely's own. He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his fractured relationship with his late father surfaces throughout — most devastatingly on Jacobsons, where he bellows 'I should be more sad' about his father's death, the emotion failing to arrive on cue. That's not Fall territory. That's something rawer and more specific. Pugnello has no hummable tunes and no interest in acquiring any. Its power is entirely textural — sudden detonations of volume, treated vocals shelled by noise bursts in At the Gallop, Computer Sadness's pulse-like heartbeat disrupted by atonal guitar. If you need a melodic foothold anywhere in the runtime, the album will not provide one. This is not a complaint; it's information. The claim that Gilla Band have reinvented guitar music is probably one adjective too many. What they've done is make guitar music almost unrecognizable as such — which is harder and more interesting than reinvention. Pugnello is a genuine article: anxious, unpredictable, occasionally funny, and stubbornly itself. Whether it's a soundtrack to anxious times or simply an exhilarating document of a band operating well outside normal parameters, it earns the comparison to My Bloody Valentine in the only way that matters — you'll be genuinely unsure, on first listen, whether it's supposed to sound like that.
