Girl Band - Paul

Paul. Such an innocent name for a song, isn’t it? But the track itself pushes the Girl Band formula through the window and over the edge, falling frantically and a hundred miles an hour and chortling all the way.

The Irish four-piece have become renowned for their in-your-face, tour-de-force live shows, gaining them a reputation as one of the must-see live acts in the country right now. It’s well deserved, too: frontman Dara Kiely has evolved into a ferocious beast of a performer over the past few years, with the rest of the band forming a tight-knit relationship that’s as impenetrable as Fort Knox. Yet how do you capture that magic on record? How do you get down the ear-splitting intensity, and the crushingly kinetic energy? Well, you write ‘Paul’, of course.

‘Paul’ is the culmination of everything that’s made Girl Band brilliant to date, on-stage and off. There’s that spoken-word drawl of Kiely’s, pushed to the front like a late night drunken confrontation. There’s the rising tension of the bass guitar, chopped and skewed and invoking uneasiness. There’s the batshit lyrics - “she’s a gent / give her a call / my daughter Paul”. There’s the yelling; the nightmarish breakdown; the pedal-to-the-metal moments that make your body propel forward outside of its own accord. There are guitars that sound like squeals from the depths of hell. There’s even a children’s pig doing pingers and having a mental breakdown in the video, for crying out loud.

With ‘Paul’, Girl Band prove that you don’t necessarily have to do anything special to create 100% pure excitement - you just need a bit of imagination, an understanding of insanity and a will to make very, very loud music. ‘Paul’ is an open invitation into a world unlike any other, a world which in Girl Band’s case is going to continually expand to humongous proportions.