Gilla Band
Third Man Records
441 W. Canfield St.
Detroit
Wednesday, October 21
Welcome to the sound and fury of Gilla Band, who absolutely eviscerated a tiny sold-out show at Third Man Records in the Cass Corridor on a Wednesday night.
It’s impressive that any touring band could pack this place out on a weekday.
I think it’s a radical act that the raw noise and terror alongside the occasional deep groove that the Irish post-punk group violently perform for you could draw this deep of a crowd.
Maybe there’s still hope out there for bizarre, avant-garde music to have an audience.
“That was the loudest band I’ve ever seen,” I told a friend the next day. We were both at the same show.
“Really?” he offers back, looking at me like he’s disappointed. It’s like he envisioned I had witnessed something louder before this. Or, perhaps, he’s underwhelmed that I found it as loud as I did.
To be fair, it felt like my brain would melt out of my ears within 20 minutes of listening to Gilla Band live. I mean, one of the staffers at Third Man frantically came up to me after a song or two: “We forgot to give you earplugs!”
Earplugs were, in fact, much needed and appreciated. Thank you.
Gilla Band is touring behind their fourth album, Pugnello, out now via Rough Trade Records. The record has received rave reviews across the board.
And that’s saying a lot! If the record is considered great, then seeing them live is to see this rabid, seething collage of sound brought to life.
This is like you took the best basslines of the Stone Roses (and a few other tough-to-pin-down Manchester bands of this era) and put them through a wood chipper, frantically trying to put some semblance of a song together. There’s elements of dark, brooding, and cold techno that flows throughout, like you went to a rave in an abandoned meat factory and got lost for hours — but still kind of enjoyed it. There’s angular, aggressive guitars pulsating and soaring above one of the crunchiest, fattest and distorted bass guitars I’ve ever heard.
On top of all this, the vocals of Dara Kiely come across like the vocal effects they’d put on any adult that talks in the Charlie Brown universe.
They absolutely ripped. One of the best shows I’ve seen in 2026.
There’s something powerful about a band who can pull together so many dissident, aggressive, and rebellious ideas and force them to be cohesive.
It reminded me so much of attending a Detroit Opera production of John Cage’s “Apartment House 1776” earlier this year at Cranbrook. It was multiple singers performing their own arias completely separate from one another while pockets of musicians (33 members of the Detroit Opera Orchestra in total) were staged throughout, performing their own songs completely separate from the numbers being sung by the singers.
Cage designed it as a “circus” of sound.
And truly, it was a frustrating blur of sound bleeding into one gallery from the next one over.
It was also one of the most musically brilliant productions I’ve ever seen.
Gilla Band has some of John Cage’s “Apartment House 1776” in their musical DNA.
None of this should work, but god damn, it absolutely does.
And everyone who was at Third Man last Wednesday night is better for it.
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