Gilla Band dig down to the bone on Pugnello

Gilla Band have, to date, made a career of doing the exact opposite. Four albums in, they have been systematically stripping away everything they can no longer use – the Marie Kondo of modern alternative. They’ve shed their early post-punk skin, moving through nebulous noisy / no wave sub-sub-genres and into their own space. Pugnello is a boiled down jus, a double concentrated squash of a record.

Their music is heavy (in several senses) without ever being po-faced. Indeed, the impish instincts of vocalist Dara Kiely can be a touch annoying. The nerve jangling distortion of “The Angelus” soon has its tension punctured by the non sequitur “Gary Lineker is a crisp maniac.” But the balance of mischief and menace gives the record a much needed lightness. Early highlight “Placeholder” is a mangled hybrid of “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit” and “Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3”, built around free associative couplets like “Dad rock already / Sleeping with your teddy.” It’s our first real glimpse of the electronics that backstop the LP, and we’re clubbed in more ways than one.

The apotheosis of Gilla Band’s approach comes on “Jacobsons”. Much of Pugnello effectively eschews melody; here, they barely have a use for rhythm, either. A cartoon mallet of bass and a rudimentary two-step beat is all we get as Kiely contorts himself, yelping “You’re taking the ball home / You’re wrecking my head bone.” Throbbing and hypnotic, it’s just about on the right side of migraine-inducing. They find even more intriguing textures on standout “Computer Sadness”, built around Kiely's twisted vocals and the sound of a heart, beating a little too fast for comfort.

Still, one has to wonder where Gilla Band go from here; there’s only so much you can strip away before you’re not, in fact, making music anymore. But placed alongside their contemporaries in the last decade’s post-punk boom, what they’re doing is far harder to define, and a great deal more interesting.