Delorentos dare to be different with new album

Date Published: {J}

As the song once said “breaking up is so very hard to do”. This proved to the case for Delorentos, when the Dublin based quartet announced their split in 2009. A few months later they decided against this and returned with You Can Make Sound, their second album.

Three years on and the band are still together. They recently released Little Sparks, their finest set of songs yet and will showcase these in the Róisín Dubh on Friday, March 9. Lead singer Rónán Yourell explains what re-united the band – and has kept them together.

“We said right, if we’re going to continue the band on, firstly the music should be what everyone wants it to be,” he says. “The four of us all contribute to the song writing and sometimes you can hamper each other a bit. So we were focused on facilitating each other and exploring ideas no matter how crazy they were.”

The other members of Delorentos are Kieran McGuinness (vocals/guitar), Níal Conlon(bass/vocals) and Ross McCormick (drums/vocals). For Little Sparks, the band wanted to find new ways of promoting their music.

Last year, they released a 4 track EP, which came with a 40 page magazine that featured interviews with people like graffiti artist Will St Ledger, and other creative talents who inspire the band. At the end of January, Delorentos set up ‘pop-up’ shops in Galway and Cork to mark the release of their new record.

“When the music was done – and we were absolutely thrilled with the album, we think it’s the best work we’ve done – we wanted that creative element to not stop with the music,” says Rónán. “With this release we’ve used our imaginations.

“The pop-up shop was another idea – I’m not going to take credit for it!” he laughs. “It was probably Kieran. Why not have our own shop for a day? When you’re looking at releasing an album, and going around the country to promote it, they’re just aren’t the record shops there were a few years ago. As well as it being something creative, there was a practical element in terms of the in-stores that we would normally do.”

Delorentos set up their day-long pop-up shop in Galway City, just off Dominick Street. How did it go for them?

“It was great!” says Rónán. “We were just around the corner from Monroe’s. It was a hairdresser’s, so there are still a load of the basins in there. We brought some stuff up to Shop Street, played a short set and chatted to people, told them what we were doing, then bringing them back down.

“Playing gigs is what we’re all about and I love it to bits,” he adds. “But it’s really nice to do different things and we’ll never forget this experience. It’s lovely to push ourselves a bit. If you don’t have other things going on in your life that are inspiring you, it’s hard to write.”

Delorentos showed in their 2007 debut, In Love with Detail that the band could pen a catchy tune, but Little Sparks is a noticeable step-up. Gems like Care For, Bullet in a Gun and Did We Ever Really Try? immediately impress. At times, they sound like a different outfit. Were they looking for a new direction?

“It’s not that we set about to deliberately change anything but we wanted to make sure that this was the best thing that we could do,” says Rónán. “We started out as a guitar band. I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and The Strokes, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand – early noughties stuff that I was obsessed with when we started the band. But over time, I felt that maybe it would be nice to open that up and not have any constraints.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.