toughloverecords:

Last night Girls Names announced they’d be disbanding for good, after ten long and short years.

Ten long years because for us and them, it started on MySpace, which is perspective-forming if nothing else. A few emails back and forth followed, but never that many to begin with. A CD-r or two in the post (more perspective). That letter that accompanies this text - the lambs of youth in those lines. I remember seeing the band play at the now-closed Macbeth, at what I believe was their first ever London show. There was only Cathal and Neil then. They didn’t speak much, and seemed to think even less of me, which is always a sign of sound judgment. But the music was a total racket and I thought quite a lot of it. We simply and without design rolled from there. We released records modestly, and people responded enthusiastically, and in greater number with each album - especially so when they outgrew the two-piece set up, which begat a habit of shifting shape from one record to the next. Being mostly from Belfast (though of course there were ties with Dublin), the music was partially incubated from the wider machinations of the music industry and prevailing trends, which afforded them a particular mystique. The internet may have mostly erased the notion of locality, but people are still from places and places shape who those people are and what they do. Sophisticates of a strange local history. That’s what i consider them. They often referred to themselves as a European Band - I think i know what they meant by that. It said we’re not British because we’re from Ireland, and it also said we’re not only Irish. At times inward-looking, at times expansive - i hear that ideal in the music.

Ten short years, because that’s how time feels when you’re at the end of something. Where did that time go? Quantatively, it went into five albums and a handful of singles. They’re there forever now, their footprints on the world. Qualitatively, into ideas, experiences, friendships, things that don’t stop now. I’ll remember it all. For them now, a new life. 

WHEN ARE YOU GONNA LEAVE

YOU FUCKING TRAMPS?

2009-2019

Belfast

Europe

x

•  •  11 notes

toughloverecords:

Girls Names release their new album, Stains on Silence, on 15th June. The Quietus have shared the first track from the record. Listen here or below.

The album is available on several different vinyl formats, with two different front covers:
black vinyl w/ cream cover
orange vinyl w/ black cover (indie stores only -300 copies)
ultral clear vinyl w/ black cover & poster (online only - 200 copies)

Pre-order here

Tour dates
June
15th - Blackbox, Belfast
19th - Moth Club, London
20th - Oporto, Leeds
21st - Old Hairdressers, Glasgow
22nd - Night People, Manchester
23rd - Whelans, Dublin

Biog
It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release.

Following 2015’s blitzing Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted – mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled out from the stress of rushing the record and not being happy with it, as well as being skint with no impending touring on the cards and constantly having to worry about rent.”

The stumbling blocks that proved a strain became the album’s defining breakthrough. Recorded in various locations including Belfast’s Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley, Cully’s home and the band’s practice space, spontaneous creation, cut-up techniques and self-editing took centre-stage for the first time. “We started tearing the material apart and rebuilding, re-editing and re-recording different parts in my home in early Autumn last year,” says Cully. “When we got them to a place we were happier with we went back into Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley to finalise the mixes to what they are now.”

Where AAAV proved a brazen statement of intent, Stains on Silence bounds forth as its feature-length comedown. What could have seen the band buckle became an opportunity for approaching things tabula rasa. During its two-year transmutation, Cully, bassist Claire Miskimmin and guitarist Philip Quinn had a single aim for their fourth album: to make an old-fashioned record clocking in around 30 to 35 minutes in length that made the listener reach straight for repeat. From the Bang Bang bar-summoning swoon of opener ‘25’ and the submerged disco doom of ‘Haus Proud’ to the rapt, dub-leaning ‘Fragments of a Portrait’, Girls Names have excelled in their goal by forging an LP of synchronous nuance and defiance.

Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire (“I want to bathe again, I want to swim again / In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold.” — ‘25’). But while Stains on Silence came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it’s both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn’t be more assured. (Brian Coney, March 2018)

•  •  7 notes

Surrender

•

•  •  2 notes

Restraint.

•

•

(Source: Spotify)

•  •  1 note

•

Group
Zero
Private
Index

•

(via stimme-frisst-feuer)

•  •  2,027 notes