15 Great Irish Bands (That Aren't U2)

If everyone that bought a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico went out and started a band, everyone that bought a copy of Loveless went out and started a band that sounded exactly like My Bloody Valentine. Seriously, look at the number of bands formed in the Dublin foursome’s 20-year hiatus that rip directly from the My Bloody Valentine playbook. The thing is, when you’re just stealing pages you never get the whole story.

You can rip the dizzying whammy bar heroics or the sensuous songwriting or the ear piercing volume, but Kevin Shields and co. had more to their work than even just those facets. Both Loveless and Isn’t Anything were, and remain, landmarks in the realm of indie rock—to say nothing of the questionably dubbed shoegaze genre that they almost singlehandedly spawned. Everyone tried to copy it and no one could even lay a finger on the high gloss emotionality that the band was able to conjure at their best.

You know that wonderful moment in High Fidelity where Dick makes a friend/lover by throwing on a record by a band that he supposes is the direct antecedent to Green Day’s pop punk emoting? Yeah that’s Stiff Little Fingers out of Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Another John Peel favorite, this quartet formed in the midst of The Troubles and frequently used their adenoidal take on The Clash’s stripped down early material as a form of governmental indictment. They’re certainly not the first or last punk band to have a political bent to their songs, but their take is considered, and even at times playful and humorous, and for this reason remains fresh. That’s to say nothing even of their highly influential distillation of stripped down punk energy, that’s worth seeking out even aside of lyrical content.

Lionize Van Morrison all you want for the bar songs that eventually ended up ruling classic rock radio, but the dude wrote some stone cold classics. Astral Weeks in particular finds Mr. Brown Eyed Girl in an impossible loose mode, crafting slippery folk tunes that function more like mantras than pop songs. It’s a delirious, bleary-eyed approximation of the music that ran before him—daring in its structures and impeccably considered arrangements. If you’ve avoided George Ivan Morrison on the basis of his worn to death tracks, consider Astral Weeks at least. It’s the skeleton key to unlocking a surprisingly dense catalog—one that’s deserving of time that few listeners are willing to give.

It’s only fitting that Thin Lizzy’s commercial success began in proper with a version of the traditional Irish folk song “Whiskey In The Jar.” Phil Lynott and co were locals through and through and they took off by bringing a version of an old Irish song to the masses. Though their career from that point launched to more traditional classic rock territory, they embodied the hard partying spirit that the song espouses throughout the rest of their career.

There’s Lynott’s world-weary vocals, the general spirit of camaraderie across their songs, the roiling drinking songs they composed for a new generation, and those guitar solos. Every element of their sound was primed for good vibes, a nearly 20-year long party that was cut short by Lynott’s tragic death in 1986. The vibes live on.

Traditionally when you think Black Metal, you probably think Scandinavia, but Altar of Plagues wasn’t a traditional black metal band. With an approach to the space and sensory deprivation akin to their US peers, this Cork-based trio chunked out three tumultuous and considered LPs before calling it quits at the end of 2013.

Bassist/vocalist Dave Condon’s violent squelches were often the pièce de résistance of any given Altar of Plagues track, but it was the band’s glacial pacing and dramatic doom-laden instrumentation that gave the records their supernatural heft. These tracks tumbled and roiled with the best of them and at lengths often breaching the 10-minute mark represented undertakings as ambitious as anything that Wolves in the Throne Room or Deafheaven have released in recent years.

It’s probably best to forget that the members of Virgin Prunes were childhood friends of Bono, because the Gavin Friday fronted band is nothing like that. Instead of stadium anthems, Friday pens gloomy bedroom pop gems descendent both from post-punk and its goth offshoots. It's just about as dour as you might expect.

Friday’s strange adenoidal vocals can run the gamut from Robert Smith's croon to Ozzy Osbourne's yelp in the same song, and his band’s atmosphere-heavy take on post-punk provides a suitably murky bedding for Friday’s off-kilter utterances. “...If I Die, I Die” is chock full of wonderfully sinister dramas, and even if Friday and co. didn’t inherit their homies’ knack for instantly memorable hooks, they manage to pull together a singular climate for their harrowing industrial tunes.

In the tradition of several long in the tooth American guitarists, Cian Nugent blends a century of folk music, indian ragas, and experimental composition into a unique blend of instrumental guitar work. Compared to his American contemporaries, like William Tyler and Daniel Bachman, however, Nugent’s solo efforts tend to push a little further into unknown realms.

Bursts of organ drones and guitar freakouts punctuate the otherwise laid back instrumentals. Any modern artist that attempts instrumental guitar music has to attempt something to prove themselves more than just an apostle of the Church of John Fahey, and Nugent’s tactic appears to be a unique one. Rather than make a virtuosic push into intensely elaborate guitar passages or hew closer to the Delta blues roots of the style, Nugent eyes the future, bringing new elements and forging a new path in a genre that doesn’t often concern itself with seeking new sonic ground.

The four rootsy records that Fionn Regan has churned out since his 2006 debut, The End of History, are loose collections of wayward pastorals—the sorts of records you might imagine being conjured from the relative isolation of a small rural community with more goats than people. They’re conversational but sleepy collections of delicately plucked acoustic guitars and swooping string parts that owe more to the contemporary acoustic guitar masterworks that Nick Drake was making in the '70s than they do to the rich history of Irish folk music.

Despite the fact that Regan hails from Bray, a bustling seaside town on the west coast of Ireland, the bucolic imagery and uniquely modern voice that he imbues his songs with make his work a singular contribution to the string of folk songwriters that Ireland has produced over the years. His work is pure and stripped down, direct in its emotional content and its sonics—free of frills and all the more compelling for it.

Indie pop has always been the purview of Ireland’s closest neighbors. Think of all the twee bands from Glasgow and London... the list is long enough to fill out the rest of the page. So it’s no surprise that the sort of jangly indie rock would finally make it over to Irish shores, but with September Girls, something got a little mangled in the journey.

Drawing as heavily on battered and bruised '90s alt-rock as on the fey melodicisms of twee bands past, the Dublin fivesome makes a painfully catchy brand of noise pop not unlike their Fortuna Pop! labelmates Joanna Gruesome. Their debut LP was finally out in January of this year and it's chock full of prickly cuts that wouldn’t sound out of place on the darker side of Slumberland records or playing on the blown out speakers of a tiny Glaswegian cafe.

Formed in Dublin when the gloomy shades of post-punk were in vogue, The Stars of Heaven brought a sliver of sunshine to the Irish musical climate. Drawing heavily on the Byrds' wide-eyed country rock, the band, fronted by guitarist/vocalist Stephen Ryan, caught the eye of John Peel for whom they eventually recorded four different Peel Sessions.

Those sessions document the band at their most reedy, but it was their 1988 effort for Rough Trade entitled Speak Slowly that cemented their status as indie pop aesthetes. At a time when REM ruled the American airwaves, The Stars of Heaven represented a similarly twangy yet airier counterpoint. Though their work was certainly less appreciated at the time than the Athens alt-rock stalwarts, they pushed similar reference points into directions that were often as compelling, if less obvious.

Though San Francisco’s Sargent House houses a number of boundary pushing bands from across the globe, the inclusion of Adebisi Shank and And So I Watch You From Afar seems to indicate that the label and management group has a particular predilection for bands in and around the Emerald Isle. Given the strange and wondrous output that Adebisi Shank in particular has released over the last three years its easy to see how a tastemaking label would want a part of the action.

Between This is the Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank and This is the Second Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank, the Wexford trio has esbalished themselves as bright lights within the increasingly dour world of math rock. Cribbing equally from the slippery structures of post-hardcore, the rhythmic propulsion of krautrock, and a strange sense of humor all their own, Larry Kaye, Vincent McCreith, and Michael Roe have crafted two albums of dizzying instrumental rock that defies both organization and categorization.

The Cranberries always had jams, even still Adult Contemporary stations make room for consistent spins of “Dreams” and “Linger,” but the early part of their career had a handful of fully realized albums to accompany those timeless singles. Particularly on their 1993 debut Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? the Limerick-born band brewed up a potent mix of goth-rock emoting and dream pop genre signifiers for an emotionally hefty document of singer Dolores O’Riordan’s post-Robert Smith affectations.

Were it not for the aversion that cool kids have to chart-topping pop hits, it’s easy to imagine early Cranberries songs, and the dark undercurrent that marked them, fitting right in an era where Twin Peaks set up an affection for art that was deceptively melancholic and sinister.

31-year-old Dublin native James Vincent McMorrow is only two albums deep into his young career, but already he’s covered pretty immense stylistic ground. 2011’s Early In The Morning cast him as a pouty post-Bon Iver singer/songwriter, and though the style was lacking the narrative that everyone foists upon their favorite folkies, his was a competent if not inspired take on a familiar aesthetic.

So then with this year’s Post Tropical, instead of delving further into that defined place he jumped around, drawing instead on electronics and R&B songwriting for a strange genre amalgamation that separates McMorrow from the growing crowd of acoustic guitar toting singer/songwriters in the wake of For Emma, Forever Ago. He’s yet to fully unify the aesthetic into something easily digestible, but the songs are there. It’s only a matter of time.

While other indie rock bands were aiming for the sentimentality and bombastisity with grandiose sweeping melodies and massive string sections, Dublin’s The Thrills aimed small. Instead of aiming for the heavens, they borrowed from the Byrds or CSNY or the Beach Boys, crafting similarly wordless vocals but with a decidedly earthbound jangle that tied it all together. The “oh whoa” choruses that were in vogue during The Thrills’ early 2000s heyday can be found slapdash over records like Teenager, but it was always evident that they weren’t interested in being, like, Coldplay or Keane. You instead hear Women or The Clientele, catchy, emotive guitar pop that remains inventive despite its at times obvious reference points. It’s California dreamin’ from a locale quite unlike it.

Thanks to Once, Glen Hansard probably remains the most visible Irish musician in present day outside of, like, U2 and Enya. But before he rocketed to fame with The Swell Season, the musical, and his solo records, he formed The Frames in Dublin in 1990. Imbuing '80s anglophile pop (in the vein of, say, Echo and The Bunnymen or Felt) with the high gloss finish that the coming decade would slap on any number of pop records, Hansard found a winning, if at times obvious, combination of sweeping melodies and soaring choruses.

Though this band never found the commercial success that a number of Hansard’s later projects found, it showcased, early on, his knack for the sort of anthemic indie rock that’d find massive critical acclaim in the early 2000s.