It took time for Gilla Band to find their way back to the studio after Most Normal. Pugnello arrives as an album that matured slowly, recorded in fragments across three Dublin studios, Hellfire, Yellow Door Music Studio and Sonic Studios, and shaped by the band themselves with bassist Daniel Fox at the helm of recording and mixing. You can feel this fragmented construction in the sonic material: less a continuous blast than an accumulation of textures captured at different moments, painstakingly pieced back together.
A material that struggles to breathe, and that’s intentional
The sound remains instantly recognizable: guitars that screech rather than riff, drum machine and drums that lurched forward by deliberately stumbling over their own foundations, vocals stretched to the edge of breaking that intone more than they sing. But Pugnello pushes the idea of raw texture further. Certain passages seem recorded with deliberately dirty miking, saturated in the low-mids, as if the band was trying to make discomfort physical rather than merely suggest it. Other moments, by contrast, open onto almost empty spaces, where a single guitar motif loops until it becomes hypnotic, before a rhythmic explosion sends everything spinning.
The studio as instrument
Listening closely, you can sense the meticulous work done over several years: layers of noise that pile up without ever truly merging, field recordings that seem to intrude mid-verse, rhythm breaks that cut short a passage that was building momentum. This fragmentation, far from weakening the album, gives it a permanent tension: you’re never quite sure what comes next, and that’s precisely what keeps you on edge. Daniel Fox’s mixing work prioritizes roughness over clarity, a choice consistent with the band’s identity from the start, but one that demands more sustained listening effort than previous albums.
The voice remains the most organic element amid this grinding machinery. It shifts from worried whispers to strangled screams without warning, often buried under effects that render it almost unrecognizable, sometimes left bare in relative silence that sounds like a slap to the face. This vocal instability, coupled with song structures that refuse verse-chorus logic, confirms that Gilla Band has no intention of smoothing their message to appeal to a wider audience. This is an album you have to earn, one that demands multiple listens before revealing its motifs hidden beneath the noise.
An album that resists the easy way out
Pugnello doesn’t have the immediate impact of some of the group’s fiercest past tracks, and it perhaps lacks that handful of moments that impose themselves on first listen. But what it loses in obviousness, it gains in depth and patience. It’s a studio album in the fullest sense, conceived as a complex sonic object rather than a collection of songs. Long-time fans will find the uncompromising stance that built the group’s reputation, while others may legitimately find it barren. A demanding return, not necessarily the most accessible, but one that confirms Gilla Band still refuses to get comfortable.
