Catchy pop numbers in store with Squarehead

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell

There’s an intriguing double-bill in store on Wednesday, August 22, when Frankie Cosmos and Squarehead come to the Róisín Dubh. Squarehead are a Dublin based three-piece whose winning guitar pop bring to mind elements of Nirvana, The Beatles and Animal Collective.
Their third album is ready for release and should be out later this year. Lead singer and guitarist Roy Duffy is in good form when he speaks over the phone about the as-yet untitled record.
“We finalised and finished the mixes in March and we said ok, how do we want to put it out? Do we want to do it ourselves, like we did with the last record, or do we want to find a label? So, we started passing it around to various people we knew,” he explains.
Roy is joined in the band by bassist Ian McFarlane and Ruan Van Vlier on drums. Squarehead’s last record was 2013’s self-released Respect and the lads are currently deciding between two labels for the next one.
“It’s long, drawn-out, boring!” Roy says of the process. “Lots of emails, lots of phone calls, lots of second-guessing. But the album’s there! It’s done, it’s been done for a while.”
Squarehead’s music moves nimbly between quiet and loud moments – memorable choruses rub shoulders with crunching riffs in many songs. Is this balance hard to pull off?
“That is a hard thing to do, and we did struggle a bit with it on this album,” Roy says. “We joke that you’re getting older when you’re writing more relaxed songs, like ‘you don’t have to jump around as much with this one’. But you know, you can still have songs that are catchy and still have the same emotional response, but there’s less energy there.”
The quiet/loud balance was definitely important when they decided on the running order of the new album.
“We always disagree on that, like ‘this should be the opening’ and ‘no, this should be the closer’. But that’s where [the balance] comes in, you can’t have three heavy ones in a row – it’s the same thing with playing live. We struggle with that a bit, but it’s a democratic thing between the three of us, and maybe the producer.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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