Gurriers

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 the scalability in terms of how to be bigger  without getting away from the essence of it being abrasive and loud was incredible.”

From the rattling tension of the title track’s opening moments that then give way to a  cacophonous, cathartic climax, Nobody’s Coming To Save You takes this spirit of the sweaty  basement venue and turns it stadium-sized. It’s not just loud, but dynamic. ‘Shades’ takes  shards of industrial, angular guitar and sends them into a gnarly hardcore chorus, while ‘Drones’  is a true pressure-cranking slow build with a drop destined to decimate every mosh pit they  travel through. On ‘Pins’, they explore a looser, more melodic swagger that comes on like a  grunge/ trip-hop hybrid, whereas ‘Party Lines’ is pure insatiable dance-punk hedonism. If the  band’s MO was to find a way to make the record “slap you in the face”, then consider yourself  smacked. 

At the start of the writing process, Hoff recalls finding a quote from activist Dan Savage, spoken  during the AIDS crisis. “He said: ‘We bury our friends in the morning, we protest in the  afternoon, and we dance all night’,” recalls the frontman. “Going into the album, that felt like the  feeling that the songs should have.” The spirit of protest and resistance rings throughout, but  crucially, on album two, Hoff has also learnt how to turn those feelings back on himself too.  “This album does sound more personal to me, but everything about it is political because what  you wear, how you act, who you hang out with, everything is in reaction to the system,” he  explains. 

Hoff is a collector of phrases and ideas. He describes himself as “a sponge – and the other lads  are the same; we’re always looking for inspiration”. Dig into the lyrics of Nobody’s Coming To  Save You and you’ll find quotes and lines taken from sources as disparate as Samuel Beckett’s  Waiting For Godot (‘Nothing Happens Twice’), Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (‘Party  Lines’) and Kurt Vonnegut (‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’). The latter track, amusingly,  started life in response to a particularly irksome review that criticised the band for “saying so  many political things but having no answers”. “We’re a band, we’re not a political party!” laughs  Hoff. “So I used a Vonnegut quote, and one from [American writer and activist] Rebecca Solnit – ‘Hope is an axe you can break down doors with’ – because I don’t have the answers, but these  two people might?” 

Within the record, there are some of the most overtly outward-looking tracks that Gurriers have  laid to tape so far. ‘Party Lines’ was written as Hoff watched the war in Sudan escalate in horror.  “There was so much killing that they could see the blood from satellite pictures and that really  fucked me up a bit,” he says. “It’s about the hypocrisy of governments that will help certain  countries whilst arming other countries that will kill people in the same place, which I think is  insane.” Yet there are also more personal moments than ever, exploring topics from his friends’  frustrations with the working day drudge (‘Waiting For Fisher’) to his own dislocation, thousands  of miles away from his partner and loved ones on a tour bus (‘I Wish I Was’).  

‘Crybaby’’s warped, woozy look at the temptress of booze ends the album, says Hoff, with “a  whimper” – a curious term, but one that fits with Gurriers’ sharp, sensitive take on punk. “It’s a  question mark. You’re like, ‘Damn, that’s the way they ended it?’ It’s like watching the finale of  The Sopranos and it cuts to black,” laughs O’Neill.

The ending might be amorphous, but the journey to that place is as strong and confident as they  come. With Nobody’s Coming To Save You, Gurriers have sent their ambitions sky-high and  come out swinging.