The onset of autumn, that archetypically Irish season of mist, drizzle and the cosy indoors, is the perfect moment for the fantastic second album by the Galway alternative band NewDad. Woozy, wafting and willowy, it’s a haunting love letter to dark nights and grey mornings, a record you’ll want to listen to snuggled up as the rain hammers the shutters.
Brimming with driving bass, spiralling guitar and diaphanous vocals, Altar is beautifully bleak listening. As on Madra, their debut, from January 2024, the magic ingredient is Julie Dawson’s dolorous voice, a delivery mechanism for songs that emerge from the pits of despair but are always open to the possibility of the curtains falling open and sunlight streaking through.
As before, there is a temptation to play spot the influences. NewDad, to their credit, have never been shy about their debt to the 1980s and 1990s, and Altar references the entire A-Z of late-20th-century alternative icons, from Cocteau Twins to Sisters of Mercy via The Cure and Pixies.
Crucially, though, NewDad bring something new – something Irish – to the formula. There is a keening mournfulness to Dawson’s voice that means at moments it’s like listening to Sinéad O’Connor fronting The Breeders. Stormy basslines push ever forward, tightly cranked with purpose, but Dawson sounds like the saddest person in the universe, and that juxtaposition between guitar abandonment and turbocharged ennui is hugely affecting.
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The band aren’t ones for needless drama or for wearing their woes on their sleeves. They have, however, suffered through their share of dog days since Madra. Cara Joshi, the group’s bassist, left after the completion of Altar, and Fiachra Parslow, their drummer, will be sitting out NewDad’s upcoming live dates the better to safeguard his mental health.
Dawson has had her challenges too. In a recent interview with a UK magazine she sounded downbeat about living in London and wished she could be back home in Galway. “I really miss my family, and I find the city so chaotic,” she told Kerrang! “I struggle with the lack of peace. I would love to be able to move home and do this from Galway, but there are just better opportunities here.”
The sentiments will be familiar to many Irish people. The initial thrill of moving abroad has faded, and you are left with … what? The lingering fear that perhaps there’s a better life back home that fades away, like Marty McFly’s Polaroid in Back to the Future, the longer you stay abroad.
If those are the concerns on Dawson’s mind, she brilliantly articulates them, starting with the avalanche of melodic noise that is Altar’s opening track, Other Side. “I think of where I’d like to be – anywhere but here,” she sings.
Here and elsewhere, there’s something agreeably old-fashioned about NewDad. It is hugely reductive to compare them to other Irish bands just because they were born under the same slate-grey skies. Yet it feels telling that the defining quality of their music is melancholy, where so many other Irish songwriters of their generation, from Fontaines DC to CMAT and Kneecap, are fuelled by variations of anger and anxiety.
That isn’t to say Altar is a downer. At full throttle it re-creates the energy of a heaving indie disco: Heavyweight starts with a gauzy Sonic Youth riff; Pretty has the twitchy quality of jangling postpunk guitar; and a slamming Pixies energy ripples through the single Roobosh, with its descending riff and rising bass.
These highs and lows reach a thunderous crescendo on Something’s Broken, a stormy epic that suggests a Taylor Swift power ballad filtered through old-school indie angst. It is breathtakingly bittersweet, an autumnal chugger that confirms NewDad as alt pop’s irresistible new godfathers of glum.
