Gurriers: Nobody’s Coming to Save You
With their first album cycle coming to a close, Gurriers’ Dan Hoff talks about learning to control the chaos, the ideas running through their new record, working with Mark Bowen from Idles and why bands need the freedom to write terrible songs before anyone is paying attention.
– WORDS BY CJ / PHOTOS BY STEVE GULLICK
Dan Hoff has already done four interviews by the time we start talking, which is perhaps the less glamorous reality of being in a band whose first record did what Gurriers’ Come and See did. There are another six waiting for him the following week, and while he sounds slightly horrified by the realization that saying yes to six more interviews is considerably easier than actually doing six interviews, he is also clearly aware that Gurriers are in a very different place to where they were when they made that record.
The end of the Come and See cycle feels significant because the band that made it technically does not exist anymore. Charlie McCarthy joined after the album had been recorded, meaning Gurriers had to figure out their internal chemistry again at precisely the point where everything outside the band was beginning to move faster.
“It’s definitely bittersweet,” Hoff says. “We’ve learnt a lot from the album, and I think we’ve matured a lot in our writing. Charlie’s not on the first album, so we kinda became a brand-new band. We literally made an album, toured it, and played Other Voices, and then had to start again.”
That first year was less about immediately getting on with album two than understanding what Gurriers now sounded like. Come and See had been made instinctively, essentially five people in a garage throwing ideas around until something worked, while the new record involved considerably more thought about what each song was doing and where it belonged.
“It was really trying to take a look at the songs under a fine-tooth comb,” Hoff says. “How does this service the album? How does this service the sound of Gurriers? We wanted to push ourselves a lot further out, but also not try and make ourselves strange to our older fans as well.”
You can already hear that change in the new music. The physical force remains, but it no longer feels quite as liable to fly off its axis. Hoff points to bassist Ben O’Neill’s desire to make something confrontational without making abrasion the entire point of listening to it.
“(Ben) wanted the album to kinda sound warm and welcoming in a way where it doesn’t feel abrasive and too in your face to the point where it’s an uncomfortable listen,” Hoff says. When I suggest that the distinction might be control rather than accessibility or polish, he immediately agrees. “Control is definitely the word.”
That control is interesting because almost everything Hoff talks about lyrically concerns the opposite feeling: political powerlessness, information overload and the creeping suspicion that the systems surrounding us benefit from people becoming too exhausted to react. The new album is called Nobody’s Coming to Save You, a title which initially sounds considerably bleaker than Come and See.
The phrase had existed before most of the songs. Guitarist Mark McCormick had seen it used as motivational language online before scrolling almost immediately onto footage of a global catastrophe, while O’Neill knew a version of it from his parents talking about the reality of choosing a creative life: nobody is necessarily going to arrive and hand you the life you want, so eventually you have to begin constructing it yourself.
“I really thought it was a very strong line in a universal aspect,” Hoff says. “You can’t save someone unless you save yourself. You need to figure out your own things before you figure out how to help other people. But then flipping it on its side as well, it’s very much deeply seeped in Rebecca Solnit’s quote that ‘hope is an axe that you break down doors with.’ The axe is people coming together, and the door is the system that we’re basically handcuffed and chained by.”
What initially reads like pessimism becomes something much more communal once he explains it, and it also makes sense of the way Gurriers approach politics. They are plainly a political band in the sense that they are concerned with political things, but they are much less interested in writing instructions for the people listening to them.
“Party Lines” is probably the clearest example. Hoff’s original lyrics were about misogyny, Andrew Tate and a story involving young men and guns in a shopping centre in Carlow (Ireland), but the band told him they did not work. He kept the melody and went looking for another way into the same feeling of unease.
Then he was reading about Sudan.
“I saw in Sudan there was so much bloodshed they saw blood from satellites,” he says. “And I was like, why is this not global news everywhere? So that’s why I say, ‘We see blood from the stars, a deafening silence.'”
The image describes something horrific while also describing our distance from it: blood visible from space, while somewhere else somebody is still scrolling past. Hoff says McCormick once described Gurriers’ political writing as almost journalistic, which made sense of something he had been doing without consciously naming it.
“We’re not trying to be a preachy band when it comes to political stuff,” Hoff says. “It’s more of a journalistic approach. It’s more like, ‘These are the facts and this is what’s happening in the world, and you should be concerned about it.'”
That concern broadens on “Nothing Happens Twice,” where Hoff folds together Palestine, the Los Angeles fires, his own experience of education and the relentless stream of information arriving through the same device.
“When I actually look back at ‘Nothing Happens Twice,’ I’m singing about Palestine, I’m singing about the fires in LA, I’m singing about my own issues growing up in the education system, and I’m singing about all these things and it’s all compiled into one,” he says. “It’s like a scattered brain. It’s like a scattered mind.”
The more troubling question is what that constant volume of information is doing to everybody else.
“There is so much happening in the world and we’re constantly bombarded by doom and gloom online that it almost is becoming nothing to us,” Hoff says. “There’s no reaction. I’m reading the news and I see something absolutely crazy all the time, and it’s not the same kind of reaction you would have got ten years ago.”
He sees danger in accepting that numbness as inevitable, because public exhaustion eventually becomes useful to people who would prefer not to be watched closely.
“That’s exactly what governments and right-wing political parties want from people,” he says. “They want people to be desensitized because they can do fucking anything then.”
If Gurriers sound more certain about what they want to say, the new album also benefited from somebody outside the band arriving with an almost ridiculous amount of enthusiasm for what they could become. Hoff had known IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen for around a year after hearing Bowen say on a podcast that artists should stop being afraid of contacting other artists. Hoff took the advice literally and messaged the person giving it.
When Gurriers began looking for a producer, their original plans kept collapsing because people were unavailable. Hoff asked Bowen for advice until Bowen gave him a different answer. “He just sent me a message,” Hoff remembers. “He was like, ‘Man, I wanna do the album. I wanna make it.'” What Bowen initially brought was less some grand production philosophy than the excitement the band itself had inevitably begun to lose after living inside the songs for so long.
“It was his excitement and his enthusiasm, and him ringing me nearly every second day being like, ‘What if we did this? What if we did that?'” Hoff says. “It was really the excitement that you almost run out of because you’ve been in it and working at it so much. It was so refreshing to see someone else bring in that energy.”
John Congleton had originally been Gurriers’ first choice to produce the entire record, but he was unavailable. Then, while the band were in America with mixes they were unhappy with and release schedules becoming increasingly uncomfortable, Congleton suddenly emailed.
“Someone’s after dropping out of session work. I have ten days free. I can mix your album,” Hoff remembers him saying. “When that happened, there was a bit of, ‘The universe is speaking to us here.'”
The finished record may be more controlled, but Gurriers have not suddenly become interested in behaving themselves. What has changed is their understanding of where the music now has to travel. Supporting Inhaler in larger venues forced them to think about something that barely matters in a basement, where the dimensions of the room do half the work for you.
McCormick posed the question that stayed with Hoff: “How do you convey that feeling to the person at the back of the room in a 2,000-cap Apollo? How do you get there? But then how do you do that in a stadium?”
Gurriers seem conscious of the familiar danger of writing for bigger rooms and enlarging everything until most of what made a band interesting disappears. Hoff talks instead about projecting the character of Gurriers rather than replacing it, because the opportunities in front of them have changed.
That is a considerable distance from where the band began. During COVID, Hoff lived with McCormick and O’Neill west of Dublin, and after repeated lockdowns he genuinely began wondering whether playing live was something he would ever get to do again.
“I remember just being so depressed and being like, ‘This is just the worst. I just wanna get back into the room,'” he says. “I didn’t even care about making it as a band. I just wanted to get in and make music.”
A few days before our interview, Gurriers had played Electric Picnic in front of somewhere around 15,000 or 20,000 people.
But Hoff’s most interesting observation about those two years is not that Gurriers somehow overcame adversity and ended up on a festival stage. It is that nobody knowing who they were gave them permission to be bad for a while, and he is no longer convinced young bands routinely get that luxury.
“We were in a room for nearly two years where no one even knew we existed, so we could just make all the mistakes and no one would see it,” he says. “Now you see bands that are young and online with TikTok and thousands of people see it straight away. They’ve already made an opinion about what this band is. But you need to fail. Jesus Christ, we fucking wrote some terrible songs in those two years until we wrote ‘Top of the Bill.'”
There is something particularly useful in that idea coming from Gurriers now, because practically everything about the band has become more visible. The songs are scrutinized more closely, the rooms are larger and the questions surrounding what they say carry more weight.
The temptation might be to become careful, but the next version of Gurriers sounds less like a band learning to be careful than one discovering how deliberate it can become without losing the instinct that made the whole thing worth doing.
Nobody was going to do that work for them. Nobody was going to sit with the terrible songs until they became great ones. And nobody could guarantee that the people at the back of those bigger rooms would ever feel what the five of them once felt inside a rehearsal space west of Dublin.
That part, they had to figure out themselves.
