REVIEW: Gilla Band - Pugnello
Would it be fair to say that GILLA BAND are quite unappreciated? At least in relation to their influence over modern noise rock and industrial. They’ve been around for fifteen years now, but curiously, when discussing modern noise rock, names like CHAT PILE, BLACK MIDI (at least on their first album) and MODEL/ACTRIZ are brought up more than anything else - the latter of which has released both their debut and sophomore albums since the last GILLA BAND record, and are now working with the likes of MILEY CYRUS, so their influence can’t be understated.
But GILLA BAND’s third full-length offering, 2022’s Most Normal, felt like it should’ve been a similarly big breakthrough as Schlagenheim, God’s Country or Dogsbody. With songs fusing synthesisers and distorted guitars into ugly, intense controlled chaos, and others based around hypnotic and mechanical percussive sections, it should’ve been an extreme music fan’s dream. Notably, though, the extremely clean production only helped these sections pop out. One of its biggest strengths was touted as a misstep, and although it worked like a charm in the context of the album, some saw it as emblematic of a perceived lack of rawness in modern noise rock. So unfortunately, it went under the radar somewhat. It was disappointing to see people miss out on this music that felt so singular and bustling with ideas.
“The trick is to be louder than everyone else” is a line from bassist Daniel Fox that Pitchfork keeps posting alongside recent coverage of GILLA BAND. But it’s too great to bring up; it’s effectively the band’s thesis statement - and it feels all the more prescient in the face of what might be their most important release yet - Pugnello. The album title? A reference to a thriller novel by vocalist Dara Kiely’s uncle, following a laptop with a haunted font - Pugnello. The album cover? Kiely painted over various bad photos from tours, attempting to prove that he could create something great from it. It’s a striking metaphor for their music as a whole, mashing concepts that should usually never work together and creating something wholly new out of it.
Opening track The Angelus kicks things into gear with rhythmic guitar distortion, as Kiely starts listing off these bizarre, stream-of-consciousness phrases that sound as though they could be commonplace sayings. It’s this surreal mix of familiar and alien - all the while his words are broken up by bursts of percussion and noise. Even at its silliest, it keeps the listener on the edge of their seat with the sheer tension created by the instrumentation.
The second track and second single, Placeholder, is where the album really starts to sink its teeth into you. Broken up into two notably different sections, the first half has Kiely doing this Mark E. Smith-esque delivery, with musings on cultural events from the mid-2000s and other moments from his childhood, before launching into a chorus of delay-laden instrumentation and wailing guitars, all the while Kiely’s maniacal vocals make it almost impossible to make heads or tails of what he’s saying. The second half switches it up - whatever life the song had in it has been drained and replaced by a cold, mechanical rhythm. It’s completely hypnotising; you don’t even notice the two minutes go by while listening to it. Lines like “I’m injecting a lethal dose of nothing, I’m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay” orbit around your brain, just barely picking up on what Kiely’s saying through it all.
Throughout the album, Kiely speaks about some intensely personal topics, firstly on Alogia, a song whose title names a condition characterised by extreme difficulty with speech, generally linked to mental health conditions. It was written at the same time that Kiely himself was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the album at points touches on how he deals with this diagnosis. “A steady structure, routine and purpose / That kind of life would be so perfect / Especially ‘cos I’m a schizophrenic” is one of those lines that you don’t know how to interpret, whether it’s supposed to be tragically funny or just tragic. Many of the words here feel like unfinished thoughts, a choice that is undeniably intentional.
Jacobsons also outlines a major theme personal to Kiely that runs through the album: the death of his estranged father. The unbroken distorted rhythm slowly grows in volume like a tidal wave at points while Kiely reflects on his grief, and how he feels he should navigate it, how he should be expected to navigate it. “I should be more sad”, he shouts, fighting the growing intensity of the track, battling this inner turmoil before it finally fizzles out.
We end on the two-track run of Crisp Pop and The Gallop, the former being this album’s longer cut. Every GILLA BAND album has something like this, whether it’s The Weirds, Paul, Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage or Prefab Castle. It’s usually one of the standouts. Crisp Pop is no exception to the rule, with the first four minutes being a cacophonous piece that keeps growing until it mutates into every instrument bashing you over the head, creating this pummeling wall of sound. The second half features spoken word from Kiely over an unrelentingly repetitive percussion section, as they slowly garnish it with more and more noise. The guitars sound like they’re breathing at points. When their techno influences come through in full force, there’s really nothing quite like it.
Final track At The Gallop, on the other hand, is bound to be somewhat divisive. It features some of the most dynamic instrumentation on the album. There’s a controlled chaos that they’ve kept up for the vast majority of the album, but this is where the floodgates open. Skip through the track, and no one section will sound the same. That’s not the problem here, though; the first thing the listener will notice when they listen to the song is the vocoder. It’s inspired by NEIL YOUNG’s first stab (and only really successful stab) at synthpop, 1982’s Trans, in which he uses the vocoder to simulate a conversation between him and his child suffering from cerebral palsy. On this track, Kiely takes the same concept and simulates what a conversation with his father might have sounded like before his death. It’s not an easy listen at all, but in context it’s significantly less jarring, and extremely in keeping with not only the album’s themes but the aesthetic as a whole.
GILLA BAND once again prove that they refuse to look backwards in their songwriting process. Every subsequent release features elements that you’ve likely never heard done anywhere else, or at least not to the same effect. The stream-of-consciousness songwriting serves it remarkably well; the instrumentation manages to tread the line between rigid, robotic rhythms and monolithic walls of noise, doing both at precisely the right moments while somehow keeping this omnipresent sense of tension running through each second of each song. If this is how the songs sound in the studio, then imagine how they’ll sound live - louder than everyone else, hopefully.
Score: 9/10
Pugnello will be released on 25th September 2026 via Rough Trade Records.
Words: Noise Leonard
Photos: El Hardwick
Comments