Basciville: "If you don't represent optimism and hope, you're losing. That's all we have"

Lorcan and Cillian Byrne of Basciville are fed up with the state—but before we get into that, they’ve got to test my knowledge of their family tree.

"You're aware that we're brothers?" Lorcan asks me moments into the interview. I certainly am—and there's no mistaking these two for anything but kin, as they finish each other's sentences and match each other's steady energy. That energy is palpable on the folk-rock duo’s sophomore album Love In The Time Of The State, a dimensional LP that explores how to make sense of worldwide tumult while still trying to live a full, holistic life.

Lorcan and Cillian formed Basciville in 2016, at which point Cillian spent "probably six hours straight Googling words" that could make for good band names.

"It was Hounds of the Baskervilles, just spelt differently...for the search results," he explains.

But the brothers have been making music together long before they started strategising about SEO.

"We grew up in the middle of nowhere," Lorcan says. "You're looking around to see who's there to play with, and this guy, you wake up in the same room as him. We started playing together pretty much as soon as we started learning [music]," when Lorcan was 11 and Cillian was 13.

"We did our first gig a year later. It was in our local pub, I showed up with my drums, and the woman that runs the bar, she was looking at me with all my drums. She said, 'Oh, I thought you were just going to play the drums on the keyboard.'... I was very shy playing the gig after that."

"We thought we'd messed up by showing up as prepared musicians," Cillian adds.

As they got older, there was no question as to whether they would continue making music together.

"If I want to do something, Lorcan is usually involved," Cillian says. "We have very similar tastes and styles of writing. We're both clear on our ideas of what we like and don't like, so it's easy to bounce things back and forth."

"I sleep in the room up above him, and usually we're messaging each other late at night with ideas," says Lorcan.

And the brothers are astute collaborators, not just with each other, but with pals like The Ocelots, Cursed Murphy, and Stephen James Smith.

But back to Love In The Time Of The State—what's with that title?

"It was probably a joke, actually," Cillian says, "comparing the state to an infectious disease."

The album was inspired by today's unceasing cycle of bad news–more specifically, the depressing notion of country borders. The Byrne brothers were galvanised in response to the public vitriol surrounding immigration that’s taken off in recent years.

“Everyone has the liberty to be wherever the hell they want to be,” Cillian asserts.

Though the timbre of the record was coloured by the 2023 Dublin riots, Basciville have since come around to the good parts of Ireland.

"Relatively, it's a very safe and privileged place," Cillian says of the country. "There's pockets of paradise everywhere... This is a very positive place in a lot of ways."

"It's so easy to become professional miseryguts. You find yourself meeting friends for coffee and streaming off the five worst things you've heard that week about the state of the world... Nothing positive is going to come of that repetitive statement."

"We try to battle the darkness and everything that we find wrong with the state here," Lorcan says. "But ultimately, when we're with our friends, we're very hopeful people. We see the beauty in the life around here, so we really wanted to represent that and for there to be hope in the music."

"If you don't represent optimism and hope, you're losing, and they're winning. That's all we have, is the hope."

During the making of Love In The Time Of The State, the battle between misery and hope plays out through textural musical improvisation, especially on moody track 'Half Away'.

"I was tracking drums, and Cillian was tracking acoustic guitar at the same time," Lorcan says of the track. "The whole middle section goes into a weird, Jeff Buckley-esque moment. We basically improvised that."

"I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, but Lorcan maybe thought I knew what I was doing," Cillian shares. "We bounced off of each other in the moment for that, which is a lot of fun."

The duo's improvisational spirit is also on display in the music video for single 'Nothing Surprises (Me Anymore)', a deceptively upbeat song that reveals a deep sense of existential restlessness as it progresses. Here, Cillian’s vocals are especially reminiscent of Michael Stipe's (R.E.M.), a comparison that Lorcan insists his brother “keeps getting” from listeners.

The video features a man going about his day wearing a paper mask, hiding his true expression with a drawn-on smiley face.

"There was something about this simple happy face that encapsulated the idea of 'Nothing Surprises Me Anymore'," Lorcan says.

The lyrics see the narrator deluding himself into keeping hold of positivity through pain: "Smile away all your regret / Pray to something, tell yourself again / 'I am so beautiful, I am whole' / But nothing surprises me anymore."

Lucky for Basciville, the video shoot was more playful than painful.

"The end of the video was shot in a forest close to our house. This person, he ends up in some sort of dream realm... We were like 'this looks really bad,'" Lorcan says with a laugh. "For some reason, Cillian brought a blue plastic bag, so we put that over the camera."

"Any of the music videos we do, we never know if it's going to work until the last frame is put in place in the edit," Cillian says.

The video for title track 'Love In The Time Of The State' is similarly DIY: its cast features a number of the brothers' family and friends.

"That was, in a way, harder to do," Lorcan says. "There was an expectation, the weight of you having all your friends in it and being slightly embarrassed, like, 'if this turns out really bad, their faces are all over it!'"

"As an Irish person, it's really hard to be sincere, you know, to approach a friend genuinely," Cillian says. "Our process is usually very insular. Nobody hears anything until it's fully formed."

Yet the brothers had no trouble reaching out to a number of vocalist friends to sing on the album, including Wexford artist Meg Lowney and Claire Kinsella and Laura Quirke of Lemoncello, whose touring band Lorcan is a part of.

And, of course, there's their longtime friend Ailbhe Reddy, who features prominently on the tender 'Your Own Head'.

"We play in Ailbhe's band, and we're always talking about making a new band and writing together," Lorcan says.

"I guess it was a precursor to that, just testing the waters if we sounded good together," Cillian adds. "She's just an incredible singer and really something else in the studio. Just nails it, every time."

The three of them originally recorded the soaring yet searing track in Wexford's National Opera House.

"We recorded a load of stuff in there and then decided that it wasn't the sound we were going for," Cillian says.

"It was great to get in there," Lorcan says of the Opera House. "It's a really beautiful building. We were in for two weeks and just worked away. It solidified a lot of the ideas. Then we rerecorded them at a later date when we knew exactly what we needed to do."

The brothers opted to rerecord in a smaller space—somewhere less "lofty", Cillian says—where the sound could be "closer and more intimate and slightly darker.”

"We have a place at our family's house where we grew up, in Wexford, that we recorded a lot of stuff in… But the roof started to fall in, so we had to get help from our friends."

"Just begged, borrowed and stole various rooms," Cillian adds.

Collaborators Johnny Fox (Cursed Murphy) and Derren Dempsey (Laminate) were among those who gave the brothers studio space when they needed it most. Both men joined Basciville onstage for the live debut of their album at the Wexford Arts Centre.

"They're both from Wexford, and they played in bands that we really admired growing up," Lorcan says. "It's great having them onstage."

At their upcoming shows—including one at Whelan's on April 2—the brothers are most looking forward to playing two unreleased tunes.

"After an album like that, you're so sure of your footing in terms of what your sound is. Any immediate moves you make are always really sure of themselves and natural," Lorcan says. "So those new songs always fit straight in."

And, pre- and post-show, they'll be selling some unusual merch that they're "really excited about."

"It's got a big, huge rat on the back," Lorcan deadpans. "We're trying to represent rats and change the perception of rats."

"It's the century of the rat," Cillian quips, quoting The Simpsons: "'Everyone loves rats, but they don't wanna drink the rats' milk.'"

Tickets for Basciville's Thursday, April 2 show at Whelan's are available now.

Listen to Love In The Time Of The State below.