Irish post-punkers Peer Pleasure release new single, “Pedestrian”

3 Nov

The Dublin band are fresh off their appearance at Ireland Music Week

Since their inception, Peer Pleasure have set out to make something that their fathers could identify with, but “still hate like it was a young person’s thing.” In their new single, the band believe they have achieved just that, combining retro elements that feel instantly familiar, against more contemporary sounds and a punk-driven arrangement approach.

It’s a visceral explosion of sound that feels like a sonic exorcism, stream of consciousness like lyrics are punctuated by worm holes of noise, chewing you up and spitting you back out again. It’s art punk for art punk’s sake.

The Peer Pleasure sound consists of an orchestra worth of players; Brandon Murphy taking on vocals and guitar, Joel Pitcher, Cein O’Dowd and Jack Joyce make up a guitar trio, Jeff Miller on drums and Erik Murphy on bass. Auxiliary sounds (synth, sax, violin, percussion) are provided by Oisín Conroy, Eoghan Conroy, Fiachra Carey, Seán Furey and Joseph O’Gorman, with additional vocals and band wrangling by Conor Kavanagh.

The band find their sound by pulling on and smashing together everything from Mark E. Smith to The Birthday Party, and Captain Beefheart to 80’s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, and all while channelling Engelbert Humperdinck. Quite the concotion indeed. In ‘Pedestrian’, this cataclysm of sound comes to life, beginning with 70’s space rock oscillations before the band join in with “spikey guitars, insistent drums and some saxophone flourishes”, laying the bed for either a Frank Sinatra style crooner or an Iggy Pop punk demon, or something in between.

To help capture the visceral energy of the band, they turned to Joe McGrath in Hellfire Studios, who in the bands words, “works really slow, is very expensive, offers no praise and therefore inspired us to stoop as low as possible, explore every ridiculous, disgusting sounding idea, we love you, Joe”. The single’s artwork was designed by Chloe Harte, who the band worked with on previous single ‘Rest in Bits’.

Peer Pleasure seemingly run at the creative process with complete reckless abandonment, ready to embrace whatever sonics the can wring out from their instruments. But this isn’t mindless noise, amongst the bravado it’s considered and careful, no band can have three guitars and a saxophone and sound this coherent by accident. The production lends itself perfectly to their mutli-genre, multi-decade, sonic exploration.