Gurriers Interview: "There's a lot to be angry about at the moment"

Gurriers, by their own admission, are angry. The words that frontman Dan Hoff spits in the group’s songs are laced with rage. The grinding instrumentation is disquieting. Their feverish music captures the weird, paranoid spirit of the current zeitgeist, massages it a little, and then exorcises it with roars, booms and screeches. It is cathartic, both for them and for us.

The band, completed by bassist Charlie McCarthy, drummer Pierce O’Callaghan, and guitarists Ben O’Neill and Mark MacCormack, are set to release their debut album, Come and See, on September 13, while their gigging schedule is about to become more intense than anything they’ve ever faced before. But they’ll take it in their stride.

Like any punks worth their salt, the members of Gurriers, when not writing or performing their seething songs, are actually quite lovely. Across a half-hour Zoom call, Hoff and McCarthy spoke to us about the band’s early days, the city within which it formed, the cake-related origins of its name, dealing with the pressures of contemporary life and touring, and great takeaways.

Let’s go back to the early days: when did the band get going?

Dan Hoff: “It was January 2020. A month or two of practices, and different members coming and going for a while — then lockdown. We had written ‘Approachable’ and ‘Top of the Bill,’ so we really wanted to stick with it instead of letting it fester and disappear. So we kept everything in the front of our minds, talking about the band all the time, making playlists, having Zoom calls for two or three hours. Charlie wasn’t in the band then, but if he was, we would have seen his face all the time.”

And then the gigs started coming in...

Hoff: “Our first-ever shows outside of Ireland were in the UK with Enola Gay. We have a massive amount of appreciation and love for Enola Gay, because they got us our management. And then a couple of months later, we did our first ever festival through our booking agent, which we got through Enola Gay helping us out, as well. But we’re a good band. It’s not just Enola Gay, you know what I mean? [Laughs].

“We were basically thrown into celebrity stardom straight away in the first-ever festival: seeing Haim hanging out, just drinking beers. Hanging out with Alt-J. Me and Mark doing our first ever interview as a band that was videoed — that had to be taken off the internet because we were both very drunk.”

Can you explain the band’s name?

Hoff: “A ‘gurrier’ is basically Dublin slang for a messer or a street urchin, but it comes from the gur cake that people used to make years ago for homeless people. After all the bakeries were about to close at the end of the day, they’d get all the scraps, put them together, and they’d sell it to the homeless people for nothing, or they’d just give it to them for free. It was called a gur cake, and that’s where they got the word the ‘gurrier’ from. So, yeah. It’s actually just about a nice cake that helped the homeless people.”

How has Dublin shaped the band?

Charlie McCarthy: “There’s definitely a sound and attitude to the way music is made in Dublin that you can hear in the band, and in other bands in the scene. There’s a very strong scene around, and it’s closely tied to what the city is like and what its values are.”

Hoff: “A lot of Irish artists went back and listened to older bands that had the confidence to use their own Irish accent. I listened to a podcast with Blindboy and Sinéad O’Connor, and she said that, for her first few albums, she sang with an American, transatlantic accent, but then she found her confidence after this album where she sang sean-nós with her actual accent. There’s a lot of that coming through now, and it’s just so much more authentic. You feel like what you’re doing is real. When I used to sing in bands and do a transatlantic accent, it didn’t feel right. It was like you were wearing a mask. But what we’re doing now feels more like what I actually feel.”

I’ve seen you describe yourselves as “nice lads who are angry.” What accounts for that feeling?

McCarthy: “In Ireland, there’s a lot of value placed on decency in the culture. So you don’t want to be a dick, but you’re still allowed to be angry about stuff so long as you have a healthy outlet for it. For most people, I think it’s probably GAA [traditional Irish sports] or football that’s their outlet. But for us, artistic expression is the way anger comes out a lot of the time.”

Hoff: “There’s a lot to be angry about at the moment. To articulate to someone how I feel about current affairs, I feel I can’t talk about it as well as I can sing about it. I spend a lot more time fine-tuning things, and then screaming it into people’s faces.”

When did you finish the album?

Hoff: “That was finished in the studio, funnily enough, on Guy Fawkes Night. The only reason I remember that is because, when we got there for the last day, me and Pierce bought a bottle of champagne and a couple of plastic cups to celebrate finishing the album. And literally, as we all celebrate with our glasses, the fireworks from Guy Fawkes went up and I was like, what is going on? Who’s been watching us?”

Your upcoming tour schedule is fairly intense. Are you looking forward to it?

Hoff: “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I know there will be ups and downs, but I just want to enjoy it. That’s what everyone has always told me — anyone who has a lot of experience in the music scene or being in bands. Put the hard work in, it’s going to be shit sometimes, but just enjoy every minute of it.”

McCarthy: “Because you have to work quite hard to end up doing stuff like this in music, it’s easy to get caught up in the harder parts of it. You have to make an effort sometimes to enjoy yourself. Me, Mark and Ben have always made an effort to go wandering in tiny little western European towns, just to see what it looks like. We’ve actually been compiling photos of the strangest takeaways we can find in every city.”

Has anything surpassed Ireland’s famous delicacy, the spice bag?

McCarthy: “To be honest. No. The spice bag is something particularly great.”

If you want to catch Gurriers on tour then check out their upcoming live dates here. For more gigs across the UK, check out our UK Gig Guide Inspire Me page. 

Check out our What's On Guide to discover even more rowdy raves and sweaty gigs taking place over the coming weeks and months. For festivals, lifestyle events and more, head on over to our Things To Do page or be inspired by the event selections on our Inspire Me page.