Gilla Band return from a four-year hiatus with a techno-influenced new tune, Giraffe, that proves they’ve lost none of their abrasive power.

I’d been thinking about The Fall after posting one of their more surreal songs, Smile, and pondering their influence on popular music.

I was coming to the conclusion that the band, and Mark E Smith in particular, were so unique that their influence was difficult to detect in the wider musical landscape.

Then I heard the new single by Irish noisemongers Gilla Band.

I’d been a fan of theirs for a decade or so, since they started out as Girl Band and put out a cover of Blawan’s techno headbanger Why They Hide Their Bodies Under The Garage.

My passion was lit further when I saw them at a fantastic show at the Scala. As punishing and abrasive as I had hoped, its utter chaos reminded me of the punk days; a girl nearby got on someone’s shoulders and ripped off her top in the frenzy.

Then they rather fell off my radar: first when they went on hiatus while front man Dara Kiely dealt with mental health problems, and then when they changed their name in response to complaints that they were “misgendered”, despite the obvious irony in the original name – their sound (and gender) could not be further removed from a real “girl band.”

For the last four years they have been inactive, leading to suggestions they had split up, but now they have returned with a new album, led by this song, Giraffe – their first release in almost four years.

“The first few sections represent what my general headspace is like,” says Kiely. “It can be a very scattered and sometimes lonely place. Feeling unloved and finding it difficult to articulate what I’m actually thinking.”

Yet by the end of the song there’s an outpouring of affectioin in the closing lines: “She chased me out the door with a hairbrush demanding that I would wear a suitable jacket.”

As Kiely says: “It’s a very Irish Mammy action. That amount of love is difficult for me to accept but it is a beautiful thing to have in life.”

With a stronger electronic techno influence than before, but the same confrontational sound, Kiely and his cohorts – guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner – continue to redefine rock music.

Whatever that is in 2026.