September Girls: Haze Of Their Lives

“This album is actually quite different to our first one,” muses Paula Cullen of Dublin indie quintet September Girls. “We explore lot of different issues – the Catholic Church, in particular, and the force it still bizarrely exerts over people in this country. Feminism and equal-rights activists everywhere. Stuff like domestic abuse and victim blaming, as well.”

The thirtysomething bassist is sitting beside guitarist Caoimhe Derwin in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel. The album in question is Age of Indignation, the follow-up to September Girls’ well-received 2014 debut, Cursing the Sea. Their indignation is well-articulated in their music – a glorious mishmash of noise pop, heavy beats and gloomy guitars. However, while their debut was a lot more introspective, this time out they’re raging against many machines.
“We didn’t discuss it before we did it. The general feeling was we were thinking about things outside of ourselves a lot more,” explains Caoimhe. “I think we inspired each other as we were writing. We started to write a bit more serious things than on the first album because the first album was more personal, this suddenly did become more political. Things that we were discussing together were taking on that kind of angle anyway so it came out in our writing.”  
First formed in 2011 and named after the Big Star song (by way of The Bangles), all five September Girls – Lauren Kerchner, Sarah Grimes and Jessie Ward complete
the line-up – share song-writing and
vocal duties.
“Generally what we would do is someone would have an idea, maybe the theme of a song and maybe a couple of chords or whatever, and they bring it in and we all work on it together,” says Caoimhe . “Then there’s some things that we were maybe jamming and we worked on together. In general that’s the way we write those, just one person brings in an idea and everybody builds and rewrites it together.”
While Cursing the Sea was recorded mainly at home, Age of Indignation was laid down at Dublin’s Orphan Studios, lending it a more powerful, polished and assured sound.
“It was great because we had extra breathing room to experiment with sounds and kind of go for the sounds we really wanted to create in the first album but we were only learning and only new to it,” she says. “So we really had the chance to experiment more.” 
“I think with the first album as well we recorded it over a longer period of time,” adds Paula, “and some of the stuff had been released previously like on 7” vinyl and stuff, so that was more of a gradual thing. We had started recording in our practice studio and at home and then we kept with that to keep a similar sound on the whole album. But this time we just thought we may as well move up a step and go to a studio and try and make it sound a bit better.
“It still sounds like us because that’s the way we sound, and it is a conscious decision to sound that way. Some people might be, well, you can’t hear the vocals and you can’t hear this, but that is our sound and we did choose to sound like that. Whether we do it at home or we do it in a studio, it’s still gonna sound like us.” 
Caoimhe laughs. “Yeah! It’s not gonna come out sounding really slick and clean. That wouldn’t be our taste.”
The title track addresses the dangers of social media: “Going around in circles/ Too much information/ It’s all cloak and dagger/ The age of indignation.”
“That was inspired partly by experience of social media and how there’s so much falseness on it, but also the danger of the darker side of it,” says Caoimhe. “I was matching a programme about revenge porn and the dangerous things that people can do. They can ruin people’s lives just by sharing something publicly. Everyone has this platform now to publish things about other people and it’s kind of frightening.”
“People don’t seem to say to people now when they’re annoyed,” adds Paula. “They’ll go and moan about it on the internet. So if they go into a restaurant and they don’t like the food and the waiter asks them is everything okay and they’ll be like ‘yeah, it’s fine’, and then they’ll go home and get on the computer and write a bad review.  I work in a shop so I have firsthand experience of that and it’s like, ‘Well, would you not have made the complaint at the time to the person’s face if you’re not happy?’ It’s this anonymous hiding behind your keyboard thing – it’s
just pathetic.”  
Does negative criticism bother them?
“It depends because it’s someone’s opinion so you have to respect that,” Caoimhe says, shrugging, “but sometimes you think, ‘would they say that to a guy band?’ Is it because we’re female that they’re saying this? Like one review said that we had lost our ‘sweetness’ on this album, and I was thinking you wouldn’t say this to a bunch of guys.”  
Paula: “We definitely never set out to be sweet so, if there was any sweetness on the first album, that was entirely accidental.”  
Caoimhe laughs: “Yeah we’re adults, we’re not a pop band. We’re not trying to be sweet so it’s just interesting because stuff like that I don’t want to think about it because it is someone’s opinion . . . but some things like that just grate on me.”
September Girls have been widely feted – Time magazine listed them as one of the top 11 new bands in the world last year – and they have played slots at SXSW and CMJ, as well as big UK festivals such as Beacons, Great Escape and Liverpool Psych Fest. However, they all still have day jobs and don’t expect to make music their full-time occupation.
“It’s very much part-time, we all have day jobs,” Caoimhe admits. “We do what we can, when we can, so any touring has to be done in holidays from work. Obviously we all love doing it but then when it comes to trying to organise holidays with your family and you’ve no spare holidays left.
“We just wanna bring out music and play it to people,” she continues. “We’re very realistic about it, we’ve been doing music for a very long time so I can always find it very funny when people go, ‘Ah now, maybe after this album launch you’re gonna hit the big time!’ I always break my heart laughing because it’s never gonna happen. I’m not unrealistic about it, either. We do our best, but we’re also not willing to compromise or change who we are to make it. We make the kind of music we want to make, and create the kind of artwork we want to create, and don’t want to compromise.”  
Paula shares the same low expectations. “But even bands you think have made it, they might not necessarily be in as good a position as you would imagine. I was reading Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney, her book. That would be a band I would consider would be very successful, but in the book she was talking about having to find a job when they went touring. You would expect they wouldn’t have to do that, but they do. The music industry is not what it used to be. I think people who are doing it and don’t have to work in another job to support that are extremely lucky and probably quite rare.” 

Age Of Indignation is out now on Fortuna