"We're Ready To Do It" Clash Meets NewDad
Catching up with the Galway risers...
With 12 months of the pandemic under our belts, many of us have spent far too much time alone in bedrooms contemplating life and reliving long days of teenage angst and alienation. It’s been a challenging time to listen to anything over 120bpm and the mainstream’s visible move towards the folksy, emotional sounds of Phoebe Bridgers, and her ilk has been a clear indicator of what musical comforts the world needs right now.
Enter *NewDad*, an Irish band with a focus on the internal and the ethereal, who are the newest addition to meet our melancholic canon.
The Galway four-piece make moody sounds for the bedroom dwellers amongst us. Combining the aesthetics and bluntly open emotional lyrics of a generation brought up online with an older, shoegaze influenced style, NewDad has tapped into a sound that will unite the Clairo-stanning youth with the brooding reverb-loving navel gazers of yesteryear.
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NewDad have a distinctly Irish origin story - after four years of casually playing together, a Leaving Certificate music project beckoned and launched the band in their current form. Since then, a year and a half has passed and the group has accrued five singles, each one improving upon its successor. For a gang of teenagers recording in their bedrooms, NewDad already has an impressively holistic, realised sound.
“We wrote songs that we liked but we held off recording or releasing anything until we were really happy with what we were doing. We did it all ourselves and it was nice to be able to make something we can be proud of in six months’ time,” says guitarist Áindle O’Beirn, sitting alongside his bandmates on the floor of their practice space. “Or hopefully in a year,” he laughs.
The most striking thing about NewDad is just how young they are. Refreshingly honest and easy-going, the band giggle and quip their way through each question and seem genuinely surprised at their success so far. “We’re all still very shocked that we’ve gotten such a great response to our music. Even now every time we release a single I’m like ‘everyone’s going to hate it’”, states frontwomen Julie Dawson. As surprised as they may be, it’s hard to see NewDad as anything but a rising success story.
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Releasing their debut single ‘How’ just before Ireland entered into its first COVID-19 lockdown last March, NewDad have already courted prominent fans in BBC 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq and BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders, earning the band a radio session with the former. “Steve Lamacq is just the best. I did the interview live and it was so scary because it’s such a massive platform. It made me realise how real it all is. Most of our listeners have come from that exposure. We’re really lucky,” says Dawson.
An interesting case study of what musical growth looks like in a pandemic, despite their position on the A list at BBC 6 Music, NewDad are yet to perform a show in the UK. The flipside of this isolation however has given the newcomers a chance to grow into themselves. “We’re still in our bubble. We’re getting the time to practice and adjust and be ready. We’re so excited and absolutely dying to play some gigs,” says O’Beirn. “It will be scary because we’re used to literally twenty people at a gig. We’ll be really excited until three minutes before we go on stage and then be like ‘oh fuck’”.
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NewDad’s music is about “being teenagers'' with their main influences coming from their “parents and Robert Smith”. Sparkling yet measured post-rock guitars form the backbone of their releases so far whilst Julie’s nonchalant vocals deliver snappy, insightful lines about love and loss. Adolescence permeates NewDad’s work but in the form of the enveloping defeatism attached to realising that life isn’t quite as bright as it once seemed - an experience plenty of us can understand right now. “A lot of people live similar lives, we write songs that are a bit vague that you can take the feelings from and not just the story from, and that way people can relate to it easier,” says O’Beirn.
Whilst it remains to be seen what the rest of 2021 holds, it is certain to be a revelatory year for NewDad. Their upcoming debut EP Waves is an immersive swirl of dreamy instrumentation and astutely forged identity that is sure to catch the imaginations of heady escapists across the world and the band wants to embrace those crowds. “We want to go on tours and play to different people in different places,” O’Beirn declares. “We’re ready to do it”.
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Words: *Kelly Doherty*
Photo Credit: *Jamie Moore*
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