Meet Gurriers, the Irish quintet channelling their anger into fiery punk

When Gurriers played their sold-out first ever gig at Dublin’s famous Workmans Club on Halloween 2021, they felt like a new band racing out of the traps and adding yet another string to the bow of the unrivalled Irish punk scene.

In fact, the band – Dan Hoff ( vocals), Ben O’Neill (guitar), Mark MacCormack (guitar) and Pierce O’Callaghan (drums) – had been toiling away since January 2020 on their pandemic-affected but brilliantly ambitious new project. Early singles ‘Approachable’ and ‘Boy’ set out this stall, on music full of cathartic anger and fizzing energy.

This September, the band – now joined on bass by Charlie McCarthy – will release debut album, Come And See, which solidifies this early promise and broadens their musical horizons.

In our Play Next conversation, the quintet discuss their fraught but purposeful beginnings as a band, the anger that fuels their music, and an openness to new ideas that keeps them fresh and hungry.

You’ve all been in bands before – was there a more concrete idea of what you wanted Gurriers to be from the jump?

Dan: I remember the very first meeting we ever had was. I had a notebook of the next four months of the band all planned out. Obviously that all got fucked up because of COVID, but the ideas were there. We all met up in a bar and got to know each other, and a plan was laid out. I still have it written at home somewhere.

Pierce: It was very ambitious from the start.

What kept you engaged in the idea of the band when you were then locked down almost as soon as you’d begun?

Dan: It was the strength of the songs. I’ve been in bands since I was 15, and you can think you’re going to be the next big thing, but you need the songs. Those songs kept us engaged.

Pierce: Other bands I’ve played in have all been intentionally not serious, whereas this had real intention and ambition.

Mark: We wanted to take noise rock and experimental guitar elements and writing pop music with it. We want to give you harsh sounds but then a catchy chorus at the end.

Pierce: The writing process is very ego-less. If somebody comes with an idea, it’s not shut down straight away but it’s there to be critiqued. It drives us to all be better.

How did it work logistically in lockdown?

Ben: We kept having Zoom calls and made playlists of what we were all listening to at the time. We listened to our pre-COVID demos, and kept the band at the forefront of our mind. We knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and we were going to get back there.

Mark: Everyone had something they had to lean on in the pandemic, and ours was this band.

By the time you played your first gig, you had been a band for a long time. Are you grateful for that in retrospect?

Pierce: It was the hand we were dealt, but it was a lot more well-rounded at that first gig than it would have been otherwise. Normally your first gig is just to your mates, but this was more fully-formed and we sold 300 tickets.

Dan: We came out of the gate as a ‘new band’, but had been together for two years.

When did ideas for your debut album, Come And See, start forming?

Ben: We were bulking up the setlist for live, and realised we wanted to make a body of work.

Pierce: It bucks the trend of new bands doing digital only EPs. We’ve done singles, but an album straight away isn’t the norm anymore.

Lyrically, the album feels purposefully angry. What things were you working through when crafting the songs and their message?

Dan: It was just about how I was feeling at the time, and trying to get it down. Even if you think the album doesn’t have a story, retrospectively you can look back and see how it all connects. There’s an anger and disappointment and disillusionment with the world, and the Catholic Church, and nightclubs. Then the last song (the album’s title track) is a dreamscape about people reading books and watching movies to forget the shit that’s going on around them.

Can you tell us about the single ‘Approachable’ in particular?

Dan: Writing that song took a lot out of me. I was so angry at what was happening during lockdown. A small group of Irish nationalists were coming out of the woodwork, and you felt like your anger was going nowhere, like screaming at a video game. I needed to do something with that anger and bottle it.

Mark: That song, which was written nearly five years ago, is terrifyingly more relevant now than it was then.

Dan: The signs were there. I did some research and then made a fake Twitter account to argue with bot accounts that were attacking Black people online, to take the anger away from them. I got all of that anger and people telling me they had my address. It got quite bad, and my partner at the time told me I had to stop. Then I wrote ‘Approachable’ because that’s what it felt like. I wouldn’t have a pint with these people.

Tell us about recording at The Nave in Leeds with Alex Greaves…

Mark: It’s a beautiful building, an old converted church. It’s just outside Leeds.

Pierce: Alex is incredibly talented and has a great ear. He has such a good way with coaxing you round to change stuff and do it again. Any time we’d recorded before, we were under time pressure and financial pressure. We had to bang out as much as we could in a day. It was good man management from him!

Dan: We also wanted to impress him!

Mark: There was a pub down the road called the Halfway House where we went when we finished the album, and it lives up to its fuckin’ name. We were the closest thing to normal people there.

Finally, tell us about new single ‘Top of the Bill’…

Dan: It’s one of our earliest songs. I was inspired by the band Life Without Buildings and the talk-y vocals. Lyrically, it’s a distorted love song and a warning to myself. It’s also the first song I use my actual Dublin accent in, which I hadn’t done before. It’s one of those songs that fell together really easily.

Mark: It also has the best guitar riff of the 2020s. Tell me one better!

Pierce: There’s six years to go…