As a band, Ireland 6 piece Silverbacks are restless, eager to move onto the next thing: 3 albums in 4 years is evidence of this. That their fizzing, rock-addled songs rarely pass the 4 minute mark is further proof. But in their personal lives, they’re not restless. In fact, they’re settling down. Lead singer and guitarist Daniel O’Kelly now lives on the outskirts of Paris with his wife. His brother, guitarist Kilian, has moved to Drogheda, an hour north of Dublin, with wife and fellow Silverback Emma Hanlon, where they’ve discovered a newfound interest in plants. They’re content. Their relationships - their friendships - take the pressure off the music and ultimately allows for something that is more enjoyable to make, and perhaps, as a result, sounds more authentically like Silverbacks too. As they sing on the closing track of third album Easy Being a Winner: “You start to figure it out.”

Silverbacks figured some things out on their debut album Fad, released as the Covid pandemic had shut almost everything down in summer 2020. The follow-up, Archive Material, was recorded and mixed while navigating the lockdowns. As a result, the way they had to record and produce it put the band under more pressure than they would have liked. The plan for album number 3 was simple enough: Record with a much more relaxed schedule in mind. And they did. Silverbacks also welcomed a new member to the band during the recording, Paul Leamy. He brought fresh energy, fresh ideas, and, as he played bass, it freed up a lot of room for Emma on vocals. The results are sumptuous, with gorgeous coos interweaving across ‘Giving Away an Inch Of’ and ‘Hide Away’

The spiky ‘Something I Know’ features clarinet parts performed by Daniel and Kilian’s dad, John. “We always wanted to get him on a Silverbacks record,” explains Daniel. “Dad also recites a few words I had prepared for him at the end of the track. It’s a small poem I wrote called the ‘Desert’s Door’.

As with Fad and Archive Material, Silverbacks recorded Easy Being a Winner with DanielFox (Gilla Band) in Sonic Studios in Stoneybatter, Dublin. Daniel O’Kelly is quick to praise his younger brother. “My favourite parts of the studio sessions are when we record Kilian on the guitar or piano. It’s a real joy just watching him play and effortlessly transpose the melodies in his head onto an instrument.”Peadar Kearney is the other guitarist in Silverbacks and is key to defining the sound of the opening track and lead single off Easy Being a Winner, ‘Selling Shovels’. Getting guitar feedback like that heard in the bridges and outro is an art-form that Peadar has mastered. The band’s twin/triple-threat guitarmony runs through these 11 songs, from the Cory Hanson-influenced noodles of ‘Look At All You’ve Done’ to the swells of ‘Billion Star Night Light’.

Some 7 years into Silverbacks, they say definitively that this is what they sound like. What they want to sound like. “A lot of the songs are new, but the album reminds me of the times Kilian and I spent in the garage as teenagers writing songs together and imagining what our band could achieve,” says Daniel. “It reminds me of the first few gigs we played with Peadar and Emma in Maynooth.

Now that Easy Being a Winner is coming out, I feel I can more confidently say who we are. We’re indie rock. And this album sounds even more like the indie rock I imagined for our band all those years ago.” It’s no surprise, then, that the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Guided by Voices are mentioned as influences. They also love Stereolab, a key touchstone for the aforementioned ‘Something I Know’. Cult Irish band Rollerskate Skinny, indie legends Yo La Tengo, and Mercury Rev are all cited, as is an interesting name: Nick Cave. Daniel says he took some lyrical inspiration from his engagement with religion and imagery.

Paris is, of course, another big presence in Daniel’s lyrics. ‘No Rivers Around Here’ is about trying to fit into a neighbourhood, and feeling torn about the changes that are likely to happen to the area in the coming years. Elsewhere lie references to what he saw from his window on Gare du Nord, where he lived opposite a sex shop. Penultimate track ‘Songs About Divide’ is the most mellow of the collection, a bittersweet song about loneliness and lacking a sense of belonging to any one place. It takes confidence to admit such feelings. In Easy Being a Winner, Silverbacks have made their best album yet.

TRACK LISTING

1. Selling Shovels
2. Giving Away An Inch Of
3. Look At All You’ve Done
4. Hideaway
5. Something I Know
6. Flex ‘95
7. Spinning Jenny
8. No Rivers Around Here
9. Billion Star Night Light
10. Songs About Divide
11. Easy Being A Winner

In years from now, anyone seeking to make sense of what life was like during a global pandemic should extend their research beyond the newspaper clippings and dive into the art produced during the period. Archive Material - the aptly-titled second album by Dublin-based art-rock quintet Silverbacks - will make for a particularly illuminating listen on the subject. Capturing the absurd mixture of monotony and creeping disquiet experienced by many of us this past 18 months, it’s simultaneously sobering and wickedly droll.

Spend more than five minutes in the company of brothers/band founders Daniel and Kilian O’Kelly and you’ll quickly realise this playfulness is hardwired. Reminiscing about their upbringing in Brussels, they gently rib one another about their early creative abilities. “When Kilian started writing music, around the age of 14/15, it was like, oh shit, that's better than what I've been doing - maybe I should latch on to him a bit,” older brother and lead singer Daniel chuckles. “And that’s still the case,” guitarist/vocalist Kilian bats back, grinning.

They laugh too recalling how - prior to the existence of streaming services - they used their dad’s extensive record collection as a lending library, much to his disapproval. “The rule in the house was [you could borrow] just one CD at a time,” Daniel explains. “It was like borrowing a book: you’d check it out for a night and then the next day he'd be immediately chasing up on the CD asking, ‘Where is it?’ And then he’d fine us.”

It was via these limited loans that the pair first discovered the work of Frank Zappa, the Beatles and Miles Davis, as well as some of the records and bands that would go on to inspire their output in Silverbacks specifically. “Television’s Marquee Moon was a big one,” Daniel recalls. “Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was another. And then Sonic Youth generally.”

The siblings’ songwriting partnership only began in earnest when Daniel moved to Kildare to study music in 2008, with the pair swapping ideas over email under the band name Mighty Good Leaders. Two years later, Kilian joined Daniel at college in Maynooth and - after changing their name to Silverbacks - they expanded the line-up, recruiting course mates Peadar Kearney on guitar and Emma Hanlon on bass, alongside a revolving cast of drummers. This arrangement continued until 2014, when Peadar left Ireland to live in France and the band reverted back to being a bedroom project. The current incarnation of Silverbacks officially began two years later, upon Peadar’s return to Dublin, with drummer Gary Wickham completing the line-up.

The five-piece’s first release together - ‘Just For A Better View’ - arrived in 2017, instantly picking up praise from an array of blogs. 2018-single, the BBC 6 Music playlisted ‘Dunkirk’ extended their audience even further, showcasing Daniel’s sardonic lyrical style as he played a man having a mid-life crisis on the site of the former battleground. As a result of the single’s success, they gigged solidly for the next two years, touring Ireland extensively, and playing shows across the UK and Europe with Girl Band, in-between working on their full-length debut, Fad.

Recorded with Girl Band-bassist Daniel Fox - who the band had initially admired for his production work with Paddy Hanna - its release was initially scheduled for November 2019, before being put back to March 2020 for logistical reasons. When the music industry was derailed by the pandemic, its release was postponed indefinitely. Frustrated, the band took control and opted to put it out in July 2020, against the advice of their label. Daniel explains, “We knew it was a risk, but just for our own sanity, we just needed to get it out there and move on to the next thing.

It was a leap of faith that paid off, with the Irish Times declaring the 13-track collection “seriously exciting”, DIY Magazine calling it “an excellent example of how a debut should be done” and it getting nominated for the RTE Choice Music Prize Irish Album of the Year. Not that the band hung around to revel in the acclaim: they were already hard at work on the follow-up.

Archive Material only cements Silverbacks’ status as one of Ireland’s most fascinating bands. Recorded at Dublin’s Sonic Studios in November 2020, with Daniel Fox undertaking production duties once more, it finds the band leaning into their early influences, delivering idiosyncratic indie-rock packed with intricate, Tom Verlaine-esque “guitarmony”. Other reference points for the record included Neil Young, Weyes Blood and - on ‘Wear My Medals’ in particular - Bradford Cox and Cate Le Bon’s collaborative record Myths 004.

Where Fad found Silverbacks focused on recapturing the live experience rather than reveling in studio experimentation, Archive Material skillfully traverses the line between the two. As a unit, they replicate that irrepressible live energy via complex arrangements incorporating everything from wistful Rhodes (‘Carshade’) to congas and Gang Of Four-style bass (‘Different Kind Of Holiday’).

Thematically, the record is every bit as rich, displaying an anthropological approach as exemplified by the album’s artwork. The initial premise for ‘They Were Never Our People’ came from a YouTube comment, portraying the decline of a town that has lost its footfall as the result of a bypass. Meanwhile, ‘Central Tones’ is an empathetic character study of someone seemingly content to trade off former glories, but secretly deeply unhappy.

On several songs, the pandemic functions as a particularly effective prism through which to examine ideas of community. ‘A Job Worth Something’ finds Daniel reflecting on his real-life experiences working in insurance while his sister treated patients on a COVID ward, and the feelings of futility and guilt he felt at the time. ‘Different Kind Of Holiday’ was inspired by the ways in which previously uncommunicative neighbours bonded with each other during periods of enforced confinement. Throughout, his observations arrived drenched in the same surreal strain of gallow’s humour that many of us were forced to adopt to lighten the toughest moments of the lockdown.

Daniel explains, “I can't remember who it was, but I saw a musician who said that they'd be keeping away from writing anything about the pandemic, because who wants to hear about that? But I’d much rather hear about an event via someone who actually lived through it, rather than someone writing about it retrospectively.”

Keenly observed and vividly rendered, Archive Material is an eye-witness account of human resilience as much as it is a compelling indie-rock record. Future historians take note.

TRACK LISTING

Archive Material
A Job Worth Something
Wear My Medals
They Were Never Our People
Rolodex City
Different Kind Of Holiday
Carshade
Central Tones
Recycle Culture
Econymo
Nothing To Write Home About
I’m Wild

With taut rhythms of 70s punk and the freak-outs of NYC no-wave, Silverbacks craft a signature sound spiked with triple guitar riffs and on-the-pulse lyrics.

Silverbacks are a 5-piece band from Dublin, Ireland. Taking their cues from the taut rhythms and urgent drive of late 70s punk and the discordant, unpredictable freak-outs of NYC no wave, they craft a signature sound spiked with triple guitar riffs, a motorik rhythm section and on-the-pulse lyrics.

The band have independently released a string of singles produced by Girl Band bassist Daniel Fox, beginning in 2018 with Dunkirk and Just In The Band, each of which drew support on both sides of the Atlantic. 2019 saw the arrival of follow-up tracks Pink Tide, and then Sirens, which was part of a double A side 7-inch released with second single Drool by UK independent label Nice Swan Records in January 2020. These single releases were backed by festival appearances at Simple Things, Swn, Eurosonic and Electric Picnic, headline shows in the UK and Ireland and supporting Girl Band on their sold-out UK tour dates.

Debut album Fad represents the sound of a band trying to make sense of a noisy and disjointed world - one that competes for your attention at every turn. For them, it has come to be a symbol of what it feels like to try and absorb the world through both fleeting moments in front of screens, and prolonged obsessive periods filled with focus. They pull apart pop-culture in search of new meaning, whether it’s a nod to The Simpsons (Fad 95), imagining a lost John Hughes film (Klub Silberrücken), spiralling downwards into youtube deep-dives (Pink Tide), or making sense of youth culture through The Urban Dictionary (Grinning At The Lid). Much in the same way that modern life can be defined by its unpredictability, Silverbacks colourful, vivid and exuberant songs dismantle their source material and end up in places that you don’t think they will.

It can be heard in the spidering guitar lines of opening track Dunkirk, or Pink Tide’s Thin Lizzy-aping riffery, Fad 95’s overt Pavement influence, Up The Nurses’ Blondie injection or Last Orders’ The Fall-inspired tale of escapism. Grinning At The Lid’s huge gang vocal chorus even recalls New Fellas-era The Cribs. Elsewhere Just In The Band draws on tales of Bowie and Iggy Pop’s friendship, and Muted Gold – having sprouted from a time spent practising Afrobeat and highlife guitar techniques – shines a light on situations in which women are continually inundated with unsolicited advice.

All over Fad are the fingerprints of a band clawing their way through the remains of the day, seeing what there is to uncover.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: There's a definite NYC vibe to their sound: Television, The Strokes and Parquet Courts all spring to mind as reference points, but there's more to them than just that. The shared vocal duties and interplay of their three guitarists (yes three!) creates a unique and compelling sound that might draw on art-rock, post-punk, math-rock or whatever else from the past but gives them a sound all of their own.

TRACK LISTING

1 Dunkirk
2 Pink Tide
3 Drink It Down
4 Fad '95
5 Dud
6 Klub Silberrücken
7 Travel Lodge Punk
8 Just In The Band
9 Grinning At The Lid
10 Muted Gold
11 Up The Nurses
12 Madra Uisce
13 Last Orders