NewDad – Madra

A gripping debut album...

From the myriad of the Galway music scene, NewDad have dropped their highly-awaited debut album ‘Madra’. Hailed alongside CMAT and Fontaines D.C. as one of the great newcomers to come out on the Irish music scene in recent years, this album shows the band taking an inward look at themselves with tracks centered around fragility, vulnerability and the urge to be found. However, the band remain sonically secure, instead growing beyond their established indie-pop sound and delving headfirst into shoegaze, a genre which they appear to thrive in.

The album opens with ‘Angel’, a grunge driven track that immediately hooks the listener in with a hypnotic bassline and dissonant vocal notes. The track lays out bare themes that will leak and splinter throughout the rest of the album’s runtime. Lyrics such as “You’re sweet and I’m sick”, make clear the contradictory, intoxicating nature of young love and the new-found vulnerability it encourages. It’s an all-encompassing opener that does well in throwing the listener into the band’s point of view that will extend as the album goes on.

However, despite the all-encompassing opening, it appears that the softer sounds is where the band seem to thrive most in, being album to maintain the gritty themes of destruction and resistance with the more mellow sound. ‘Dream of Me’ leans on a nostalgic feel, with mellow guitar lines accompanying the verses before launching into electric strokes that play on the harsher side of lost love, and the memories others have of you. ‘White Ribbons’ a standout track, let the chorus hook lead- the haunting lines “It’s so pretty how you mend yourself / White Ribbons wrapped around me”, playing alongside dream-like instrumentation that portrays a sense of loving desperation. It’s a playful, yet poignant contrast that lets the album’s themes cut through the noise and speak clearly to the listener.

With this debut album, it’s clear that the band has evolved, both in sound-wise and they’re portrayal of universal feelings. It’s an album that feels personal to whoever listens, and yet still discerns itself as belonging to NewDad through the use of elevated sound and new dream-pop styles. As a debut, it cements the band as one with a long path ahead of them. As an album, it’s a deeply moving, mesmerizing work with themes that stick with you long after listening.

8/10

Words: Lily Blakeney-Edwards

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