Belfast-based noise punks Enola Gay are following up their debut EP ‘Gransha’ with their newest collection, ‘Casement’. It’s an ambitious effort that sees the group push themselves further than ever before, taking risks and teasing out the edges of their sound for an assertive step forward.
Here, they talk us through the release track by track.
LEECHES
As we lost loved ones who died alone during the pandemic, these inept meat martinets continued and will continue to get away with everything. When their designated spare-dick spearheads are such embarrassments that their actions are brushed off as typical occurrences, you can’t embarrass them more than they embarrass themselves. We watch governmental slapstick playouts daily and still end up the punchline.
This is for the recycled hypocrites elected every round who make it mockingly abundant that we are not their priority. We are their poverty porn. Twisting the knife in us, they spend the millions they haven’t lost yet on monument refurbishment in the midst of an energy crisis. People have suffered this cost of living crisis for years. Only now is it newsworthy, with people in the upper echelon also beginning to feel it. Ironically, making the dissociation gap between real people and the likes of Parliament greater than ever.
PTS.DUP
Following a band member being brutalised in a sectarian attack that left him with a fractured skull, we felt a lot of raw hatred and some shame. After processing this, we reflected on the tribalism that fuelled the attack and our anger that followed. The attackers themselves are victims of jingoistic rhetoric that is insidiously normalised in the north of Ireland. In a country still suffering remnants of The Troubles, young people left in the middle of the road turn to alt-right political parties masquerading as conservatism, such as the DUP, searching for a sense of belonging. With talks of a united Ireland looming, we should consider how and why Unionists feel and fear that they will be left with nowhere to call home when they shouldn’t have to.
TERRA FIRMA
There’s a case to be made that Irish folk is punk music in its purest form, songs for and by the underdogs of society. Feeling like it was the right time to expand and broaden our sound, we wanted to offer something unexpected and unheard and so turned to our good friend and, in some ways, mentor Neil Kerr, Mount Palomar. Keen to tap into our love of experimental electronics and production, we let Neil take the reins and use one of Fionn’s folk tracks as the basis for what became a two-part abstract folk-inspired electronic track, unlike anything we had heard before.
‘Terra’ in its original form may never have become an Enola track, but reworked as an interlude and incorporated into a brand new track that pulled and stretched the folk ideas into a new, exciting sonic territory, ‘terra firma’ was born.
This track signals a shift in our dynamic, a new emboldened desire to carve out our own path and to continue to push ourselves sonically and lyrically to places that our audience may not always expect. We will always be a punk band at heart, but ‘terra firma’ is an indication that we don’t plan on being easy to predict or pigeonhole.
Enola Gay’s new EP ‘Casement’ is out now.
