The Talkies is the second studio album from Irish post-punk band Girl Band, released in October 2019 through Rough Trade Records, and is their last studio release under their original name before changing it to Gilla Band in 2021. The album was mostly recorded at Ballintubbert House on the outskirts of Dublin & was produced by bassist Daniel Fox. The album's repetitive & experimental sound is characterized by its unorthodox use of effects-laden guitars, abstract stream of consciousness lyrics & stylistic elements from techno & industrial music. Critics have classified the album as noise rock & post-punk, with many noting its dark & unsettling tone.
Three singles - "Shoulderblades", "Going Norway" & "Salmon of Knowledge" - have been released from the album with music videos for the first two. The album received widespread critical acclaim upon its release, with The Irish Times even naming it the best Irish album of all time in 2020.
Background
After the release of their debut album Holding Hands With Jamie in 2015, the band were forced to cancel several of their shows due to lead singer Dara Kiely's worsening mental health (which he had discussed in numerous interviews at the time). The band eventually took a year-long hiatus in 2017 & reconvened in February 2018 to begin recording The Talkies.
The album was recorded in Ballintubbert House: a mansion on the outskirts of Dublin that Fox had gotten a hold of through connections he'd made via his sound engineering & studio work. According to him: "There were lots of good rooms to record in and we knew it’d be a cool place, [...] Not being in a studio, which costs lots of money, means we got it for buttons. So it took a lot of pressure off.”
Recording
According to guitarist Alan Duggan, "the idea behind the album was to make an audio representation of" the Ballintubbert House. Inspired by Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, the band decided upon using a repetitive motif throughout the album & recording everything in the key of A to lend it a sense of cohesiveness in comparison to their debut. The sessions also involved a lot of experimentation: the Twin Peaks-inspired track "Aibohphobia" (the title term refers to a fear of palindromes), for example, features "guitar riffs recorded backwards and layered on top of each other as Kiely recites a list of palindromes", while the "unsettling" opening track "Prolix" features his heavy breathing from a "semi-panic attack thing" as caught on record during an early rehearsal. The drums on the album were in fact recorded twice: "once on the landing and once in the cellar". During the mixing stage, Fox cut between both takes in order to create the final versions. The band also admitted that much of the album wasn't written by all of the members together, and that instead they "were more into demoing and writing down parts then cutting them up, collaging them together in the computer and reconfiguring them that way.” Kiely, taking inspiration from Leonard Cohen, wrote lyrics from fragments of different songs he'd recorded on "a little organ". He also decided to not use any pronouns in his lyrics, explaining his decision & his writing process for the album in general as follows:I, you, he, she [...] Those words, when I wasn’t feeling the best, were impactful: ‘I’ was arrogant, ‘you’ would be accusatory. So I thought if I took that away, it would give me a platform to do something different and get out of my comfort zone. But otherwise it was pretty much the same stream-of-consciousness stuff, or I’d overhear things and take that down. I’ve never really written anything that has a general story, so it is rather abstract.
Composition
The album has been widely classified as noise rock & post-punk. Pitchfork notes that "[g]uitarist Alan Duggan has completely unlearned the art of riffs and solos, using his instrument solely for textural dissonance—the more nauseating, the better. Bassist Daniel Fox deals exclusively in gut-rumbling frequencies, while drummer Adam Faulkner avoids the snare like it might be rigged with electric shocks. The result is drained of any rock-band formalism, all scrap-metal clang and kick-drum thump teetering on collapse." Kiely's deconstructionist lyrics have been said to mirror this approach, consisting of references to both "everyday scenes" & popular culture figures.