“We’ve got a furious energy in this band,” says Ilya K’s surname-less singer Mick, as Hot Press sits down for a quick chat about his future. “We’ve got a lot of things coming through in the pipeline, but as far as we’re concerned, our live show is our calling card. We can tear the head off of any venue and when you see Ilya K play, we make sure that you’ll never forget it.”

If you’ve never caught an Ilya K show before, the Waterford/Carlow-based bunch are a heady mix of Beefheart, Tom Waits and Tool. Since winning the Murphy’s Live final last year, their career has gone from strength to strength. The band beat 11 other acts, bagging themselves a prize worth over €10,000, which included the release of their Empire Is A Cave EP through FIFA records, studio time and a management deal. Not ones to rest on their laurels, they’ve also put their prize money to good use by making their upcoming debut album Anaesthesia Ad Infinitum as well. Good on them!
“We produced Anaesthesia Ad Infinitum ourselves and we’re going to release it in July,” smiles Mick. “We’re excited to finally get it out there and it’ll definitely take a lot of people by surprise because we’ve all sorts of sounds on the album. When we won Murphy’s Live last year, it was great: we were really happy with the result, because financially it was a great help to get Anaesthesia Ad Infinitum made, and we also loved playing to a packed room – and hopefully made some new fans too.”
Later this summer, Ilya K plan to make even more fans by taking their show to Europe. Along the way they’ll also find time in their busy schedule to play a little festival that you might have heard about in the UK called Glastonbury.
“I’ve never been to Glastonbury before, but I can’t wait for us to play there,” Mick enthuses. “It all came about when we played the summer solstice festival last year on the Hill of Tara. One of the Glastonbury organisers was there and loved our gig, which lead to them asking us to play. We’ve got a dream slot on Saturday night/Sunday morning at 3.30am in the Shangri-La field, so we hope to get a big crowd full of people coming back from the main stage. After that we’ve got dates in Germany and hopefully others around Europe to come. All being well, it’ll be a busy year for us!”