Track of the Day: Gilla Band - 'Backwash'

Gilla Band have shared a new video for 'Backwash', taken from the Dublin group’s forthcoming album Most Normal.

The blue and yellow, riotous new single was directed and animated by Mortis Studios and follows earlier single 'Eight Fivers', also curated by Mortis Studios with additional help from Ruben Hernandez. 'Backwash' is available as a Big Love exclusive 7”, limited to 120 copies.

“The initial idea for the whole album was that it would loosely sound like a dream,” singer Dara Kiely explains. “We didn’t really stick to the brief but it lead us down different sonic avenues. ‘Backwash’ is one of the few tracks where the words represent a dream-like circumstance. The lyrics are from a stream of consciousness rant, weird imagery and all that. The track is about attraction – fancying someone and not knowing what to say exactly. It’s an indirect love song, knowing you like someone but can’t quite articulate it. Thinking that you have already expressed your feelings, but like waking up from a dream you’ve forgotten what you actually have said or felt.”

Covid lockdown robbed Gilla Band of any opportunity to try the new material out live, but the pandemic also incinerated any idea of a deadline for the new album. They were free to tinker at leisure, to rewrite and restructure and reinvent tracks they’d cut – to, as drummer Adam Faulkner puts it, “pull things apart and be like, ‘Let’s try this. We could try out every wild idea.”

The group also fell under the spell of modern hip-hop, “where there’s really heavy-handed production and they’re messing with the track the whole time,” says bassist Daniel Fox. “That felt like a fun route to go down, it was a definite influence.”

Catch them at Dublin's National Stadium on December 9 and Belfast on December 15, 2022. Revisit our October 2019 interview with Gilla Band here.

Check out the animated video for 'Backwash' below. Pre-order Most Normal here.

‘Most Normal’ Tracklisting:

01) The Gum
02) Eight Fivers
03) Backwash
04) Gushie
05) Binliner Fashion
06) Capgras
07) The Weirds
08) I Was Away
09) Almost Soon
10) Red Polo Neck
11) Pratfall
12) Post Ryan