Silverbacks – Archive Material

Dublin-based quintet Silverbacks entered as an eccentric art-rock band worth following with their 2020 debut album, Fad. The record won a nomination for Best Album at Ireland’s Choice Music Prize, after which a recess to recollect and revel in unexpected triumph would have been well deserved. Instead, Silverbacks steamed ahead with music already being written, forming their latest release, Archive Material. A timely assortment, anthropological and absurd, the loud, sardonic monotony blasts through formalities with shrewd drollness, and in today’s context, casts creeping shadows over all that has been stolen by forces continually eluding us. 

The title track feels like traces of various things, tight-lipped as to the album’s direction and built on indecisive guitar riffs. As an opener, it positions listeners uncomfortably as sources of archive for future generations, and raises the question of what they will find – an idea that doesn’t exactly conjure pretty images. 

Silverbacks’ humour is streaked with hints of sprightly elasticity, not unlike the Kooks, but the sound, which is most apparent in Rodolex and A Job Worth Something, is soon rearranged by electric guitar that almost jabbers with its own alien discourse. The latter track finds singer Daniel O’Kelly reflecting on his feelings of futility in insurance work, while his sister worked on the Covid ward. Interestingly, though the song refers to snail-paced purposelessness, the track takes an almost hasty, fidgety pace.

Wear My Medals is a raucous instrumental affair, smartly set against bassist Emma Hanlon’s innocent vocals for a full-bodied, sensory track with hallucinatory conclusions. Inspired by Bradford Cox and Cate Le Bon’s 004, it lifts the listener, then drops them somewhere else entirely. 

Silverbacks utilise their outlet with complexity and rigour, from the rugged chants and blunt philosophising of They Were Never Our People to the pick-and-mix percussion in jerky Different Kind of Holiday (which came from the way uncommunicative neighbours bonded when confined). Carshade seems to say, ‘Ok, we’ll be serious now’, with a sensitive soundscape, a humble stretch of softened electronics. 

Seeming not to favour any sound renders them a difficult band to predict – a quality always welcomed when fresh music is concerned. I’m Wild, a track for Hanlon, wisely closes the album with something easier on the ear, and a reminder of their wide-ranging skill. It’s less thunderous but by no means weak, and perhaps only feeling more “regular” because it concludes a stream of highly interesting, eclectically assembled tracks.

”I don’t know, sometimes it’s more fun just to see what comes out when we write and let everyone else worry about what it is,” is Killian O’Kelly’s view of the type of band they are. Plenty of art has risen from the darkest repercussions of the pandemic, but Silverband create a playfully safe space to explore how “normal” has been rewritten. Punctuated and idiosyncratic, it’s an astute account of humanity’s trials. Silverbacks will not go unnoticed. 

Georgia Howlett

Archive Material is released on 21^st January 2022. For further information or to order the album visit Silverbacks’s website here.

Watch the video for the single Archive Material here: