Greywind: "Looking back, I really wouldn’t change a thing… Now we feel bullet-proof"

Nearly a decade has passed since Greywind made their eye-catching debut, courtesy of the emo-rock hit ‘Afterthoughts’. Since then, the O’Sullivan siblings have had to navigate a hellish journey through the music industry, oscillating precariously between dizzying highs and bottom-of-the-barrel lows.

“Since the day we posted our first song, it’s been crazy,” says guitarist Paul O’Sullivan, sitting on a couch beside his sister and lead vocalist Steph. “But looking back, I really wouldn’t change a thing… Now we feel bullet-proof.”

Reared on a diet of emo-punk like My Chemical Romance, Blink 182 and Fall Out Boy, Greywind formed in Killarney.

“Where we’re from in the south of Ireland, there’s no music scene whatsoever,” Paul explains. “So we never played as a band – we could never find other people. Then one day in 2014, we were like, ‘Let’s just book ourselves into the studio for the first time.’ We were so nervous. We’d never played a show, and we asked the producer to put programmed drums and bass on it, so we could hear what we sounded like as a full band. Then we recorded it, and it was our first song, ‘Afterthoughts.’”

Within 24 hours of the track’s release, the pair had been contacted by nearly every major label in the business. “We thought our friends were creating fake emails and messing with us because that just doesn’t happen,” Paul laughs.

After a whirlwind introduction to the industry, the siblings were flown out to a Texas recording studio to begin work on their debut album with Universal Records. Backed by a major label, Greywind felt untouchable, their natural sound tailor-made for the spotlight.

However, what goes up must always come down. After a month of writing and recording, the O’Sullivan siblings were fresh off the plane from America when their label told them they were being dropped for lack of monetary gains, despite the fact that the album had yet to leave the mixing deck.

“We were so proud of the album we had created,” Steph adds, “and for being under so much pressure in Texas to record with no touring experience, no nothing. We didn’t even have a band around us yet, it was just me and Paul.”

After releasing the album through a Universal off-shoot owned by the pair’s management team, Greywind were hit with yet another blow as their new label, management and agent left them in the dust.

“We could tell our management had switched off the day we got dropped,” Paul explains. “The biggest proof is when Universal gave the rights to our album back, and our management said they were going to re-release it, they forgot to put a record deal in front of us.”

During the ensuing legal battle over the rights, the siblings continued to create new music behind the scenes, refusing to release anything until ‘Afterthoughts’ was back under their ownership.

The O’Sullivans were grateful to finally be able to tease the material on social media, where it received a rapturous response.

“We went viral immediately,” Paul says. “We went from 3000 followers under some of the biggest major labels and management in the world, to over 150,000 on Instagram and over 100,000 on TikTok. And it was just me and Steph.”

Since then, the pair have been on a roll, jetting back and forth from LA to record the EP with producers Sam Guaiana and Casey Cavaliere of The Wonder Years.

“It basically sums up the past four years of being in Greywind, all the struggles we’ve had and how our fans have helped us through,” says Steph. “There’s a song on it, our newest single, called ‘You're My Medicine’, and that’s basically a love letter to our fans for helping us through the past few years. They’re the one constant that has never let us down, and they never will.”

•  Antidote is out now.