And in their recent album, Nobody’s Coming to Save You, “The corruption of human morality is a constant theme.”
During a recent doomscroll, my attention was caught by a striking single-panel cartoon. It depicted one-time punk berserker John Lydon as his septuagenarian self, sitting back in an armchair, pondering where the last 50 years have disappeared to. Time may slip away from beneath everyone’s feet, but what the comic does not express is that five decades was plenty of time for Mr. Johnny Rotten to complete an ideological odyssey from anti-establishment nihilism to calling for plum-mouthed Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg to become Britain’s Prime Minister.
If Lydon can, in any sense, still be counted as a bellwether for punk, his own softening reverberates broader music’s recent struggle to impose radical messaging on pop culture – I’ve previously written about the great wave of anti-Trump protest songs that never really happened. But that doesn’t mean artists aren’t still committed to the idea that music can change the world – certainly, the fans who packed out the 3Arena on Monday for Macklemore and his famous friends still believe.
When it comes to punk, there are a couple of homegrown artists keeping the torch lit for its core values. Meryl Streek has so ferociously addressed, among other issues, Ireland’s broken housing market, gentrification and various church scandals. And there’s the band Gurriers, who we will cast some light on today.
Gurriers are built on two pillars of punk tradition: literary awareness (1970s punk music and culture even inspired a new strand of literature itself) and radical politics. You can go back to their first single: “Approachable” is a raw, shouty rebuttal to far-right indoctrination, from the internet to the real world – “Let’s unite to create division/ It starts on screens and ends on streets”.
The band’s recently released second album Nobody’s Coming to Save You, a standout Irish guitar record of the year, works in an audio clip of recently deceased Marxist writer Michael Parenti. The song “Waiting For Fisher” pulls influence from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and anti-capitalist writer Mark Fisher. (The band have also credited Waiting for Godot as inspiring “Nothing Happens Twice”, so their copy of the play is clearly well-worn.) These interests form the basis of songwriting that is elaborate in its themes.
Gurriers hail from all over the country but came together in Dublin, describing themselves as “best friends, roommates and co-workers”. Their sound is not in the tradition of The Sex Pistols, but veers more into post-punk – a most nebulous term, I know, but Gurriers have adapted the punk spirit and used it to power songs that incorporate a broad array of sounds. This is a band more 1999 than 1976: neo-psychedelica, electronica and big beat sounds are all detectable. I wouldn’t be surprised if the band considered something like The Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” to be their north star.
Take the opener and title track of Nobody’s Coming to Save You: Building the composition slowly, Pierce Callaghan’s battering drums and Ben O'Neill and Mark MacCormack’s twin guitars eventually form an intense surge of sound that underpins singer Dan Hoff’s screams. The lyrics are just as aggressive. After some nods to the news cycle, Hoff calls out public apathy to global human suffering: “Getting ready for the weekend/ While they flee a war.”
The corruption of human morality is a constant theme. The raucous “Party Lines” is said to have been penned as the Gurriers watched the war in Sudan escalate, with Hoff bemoaning the “decline of man”. The aim here is not catharsis. It’s burned right into the album title: To Gurriers, happy endings are futile and boring.
Much of the punk spirit comes from Hoff, who can do full-throated aggression when the moment demands it, but there are times when he slows to a more hypnotic pace. “Pins” boasts one of the album’s most memorable choruses, with the singer spitting out “I want it, I need it, your love is demeaning”, with maximum disdain.
The best section of Nobody’s Coming to Save You, though, is the finale. The quiet-to-loud drama of penultimate song “I Wish I Was” is the song Richard Ashcroft fans will wish he had spent the last 25 years making.
It would have been a killer finale, but then there’s a coda: On “Crybaby”, the guitars initially sound like they’ve been left to warp in the sun, before a grungy arrangement emerges. Rarely has Hoff sounded so despondent: “I really wanna hold ya, better than I’ve held myself/ I said I need ya, drunk and stumble out into the night.” Though the politics of the album are righteous, “Crybaby” reasserts a message that ties it all together: Gurriers can’t be softened.
Gone is the hardman shtick, the macho bravado once associated with hip hop, rapper and producer Michael Ward, who goes by Mickzart. “We’re after something true.”
The chapel on the ground floor is too small for a theatre “but it's the kind of place where you could have recitals, a piano player or string quartet”, says Diego Fasciati, the executive director.
The musician says her new album, Draw the Outline, brought her “great solace and peace in writing it. I hope it can do the same for whoever needs it.”
Ross McClean’s new documentary is playing on Saturday as part of the Irish Film Institute’s Documentary Festival 2026.
