The day we speak, over Zoom, it’s three-quarters of the group: Fox, guitarist Adam Duggan, and front man/vocal force of nature Dara Kiely, all in great spirits and eager to discuss Most Normal. I have now been lucky enough to interview Gilla Band for each of their albums. It was sensational, and they built on the feat again four years later with The Talkies, a denser and more claustrophobic second full-length. They melded pummeling rhythms, hypnotic grooves, buzzsaw guitars, and all manner of magnificently abrasive sounds and effects with a singer-reciter-shouter-screamer like no other.

But Gilla Band found its footing by forging a bolder, left-leaning template on the breakout 2014 single “Lawman”, a ferocious cover of Blawan’s “Why They Hide The Bodies Under My Garage?,” and their electrifying 2015 debut album Holding Hands With Jamie. On their first EP, 2012’s France 98, released under that previous band name, they toyed with a more traditional chord-driven indie-garage sound. Post-punk, indie rock, art rock, “post-Goth,” and most frequently, noise rock: all those genre names have been affixed to Gilla Band, but they all struggle to do justice to the sound of this singular outfit. And we’ve had to come up with some clever ways of being able to some of the effects and things live.” Getting the sounds isn’t too hard, but then stitching it all together is challenging. “All the measures of everything are very unintuitive, and it’s just a really jerky kind of song. “It was written in kind of a haphazard way,” says bassist, engineer, and preeminent Gilla Band jokester Daniel Fox, with a laugh. In fact, “The Gum” is such a little studio-concocted handful that as the group known until last year as Girl Band prepares to head out on a European tour, it’s proving to be one of the more challenging to pull off live. Just a half-minute into Gilla Band’s Most Normal-the chaotic Irish noisemaker's brand new and brightest, relatively speaking, LP to date-on opening track “The Gum,” you know that the quartet has lost none of the ferociousness that established it, making them one of the most thrilling bands of its generation.

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