Gilla Band (Girl Band) – Most Normal – New LP Record 2022 Rough Trade Uk Import Vinyl – Post-Punk / Noise Rock Not specified

For their first album as Gilla Band, (formerly Girl Band) the foursome has redrawn their own paradigm. Most Normal is like little you’ve heard before, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of noise put in service of broken pop songs, FX-strafed Avant-punk rollercoaster rides and passages of futurist dancefloor nihilism.

Covid lockdown robbed Gilla Band of any opportunity to try the new material out live, but the pandemic also incinerated any idea of a deadline for the new album. They were free to tinker at leisure, to rewrite and restructure and reinvent tracks they’d cut – to, as drummer Adam Faulkner puts it, “pull things apart and be like, ‘Let’s try this. We could try out every wild idea.”

The group also fell under the spell of modern hip-hop, “where there’s really heavy-handed production and they’re messing with the track the whole time,” says Fox. “That felt like a fun route to go down, it was a definite influence.”

Most Normal opens with an absolute industrial-noise banger that sounds like a manic house-party throbbing through the walls of the next room as a downed jetliner brings death from above. What follows is unpredictable, leading the listener through a sonic house of mirrors, where the unexpected awaits around every corner.