Silverbacks singer and guitarist Daniel O’Kelly recently said that when he was writing the title song, he had to imagine how officials deep underground, in the archives of a government building, would obtain secret information that the population would be withheld. It hasn’t been made into a conspiracy film yet, but the Dublin band made a song based on this “information”. And “Archive Material” also leads the album of the same name with a pounding beat, O’Kelly’s chanting, a brutally beautiful chorus and a few math rock undertones on the guitar. Zeitgeist sound, maybe. But rock music also becomes an anthropological-dystopian tale about the decline of cities and communities, including gallows humor.
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But the laughter then gets stuck in the throat of the guitars, the singer roars through the tracks as if he was seeking refuge somewhere outside of them. The band finds points of contact in the history of rock music that has gone against the grain. “Different Kind Of Holiday” quotes the Mark E. Smith stutter in a lockdown observation song. “Rolodex City” bursts out of the garage like a forgotten gang-of-four track. “They Were Never Our People” tops the razor guitar sound of Tom Verlaine’s television with a well-ordered pop tune. With their second album, Silverbacks effortlessly catapult themselves into the top five of the latest rock eruptions, in the midst of the bustling, rhythm-crushing post-punk expeditions of Squid, Black Country, New Road and Dry Cleaning.
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