Gurriers: Nobody's Coming To Save You

There's something in the Guinness. We probably need to seriously study whatever is happening in Ireland right now, because the conveyor belt of remarkable new music is becoming ridiculous. Fontaines D.C. have gone from Dublin post-punk outsiders to one of the biggest guitar bands in Europe. NewDad have pushed shoegaze and dream-pop into bigger rooms, Inhaler have carried a more polished strain of alternative pop onto arena stages, and Sprints have made abrasion and vulnerability feel inseparable. Kneecap have bulldozed through every boundary put in front of them, while Gilla Band remain a huge influence on the noisier end of the scene.

Gurriers belong firmly in that landscape. Their 2024 debut, 'Come and See', introduced five lads from Dublin with plenty of ambition and even more to say, taking aim at digital anxiety, political frustration and the uglier corners of modern life. It sounded made for cramped rooms, low ceilings and bodies colliding three feet from the stage.

Two years on, the rooms have changed, and so has the music. Gurriers have moved onto bigger festival stages and arena support slots, and the band have been open about how that affects their songwriting. In a 250-capacity room, you write for that room. When the stages get wider and the crowds stretch further back, the songs start demanding more space.

That doesn't mean they've cleaned themselves up. If anything, 'Nobody's Coming To Save You' sounds even more dangerous than its predecessor. The difference is that the chaos now has architecture around it. The guitars still collide, the drums still race and Dan Hoff still delivers much of the record as though every line has been dragged out of him, but there's far more control over when the band tighten the pressure and when they let it break.

They've brought in serious help to make that leap. Mark Bowen of IDLES and Loren Humphrey, whose work includes Geese and Cameron Winter, produced the record, with Chris Fullard engineering and John Congleton on the mix. It's an impressive team for a second album, and none of them smooth away what made Gurriers interesting in the first place. They help the band sound enormous while keeping the feeling that something could still fall apart at any moment.

The title track makes that clear straight away. 'Nobody's Coming To Save You' starts with tension rather than outright violence, ratcheting up the pressure before bursting into one of the biggest choruses Gurriers have written. For me, it's one of the choruses of the year so far. 

It sounds far more hopeless than the song actually feels. The band have said it comes across as bleak on a first listen but is really a call to action, and you can hear that in the way it plays out. If nobody is coming to save you, waiting around is just another form of surrender. Responsibility has to sit somewhere, whether that's political systems, social problems or something much closer to home. Gurriers are still furious, but the anger now has a purpose.

'Party Lines' is the clearest example. It opens with words from the political scientist Michael Parenti, making the point that the third world isn't poor and that wealthier powers go there to extract money. Hoff's vocals are deliberately distorted, and the song barely needs any time to tell you where it stands.

What makes it even better is how danceable it is. There's a percussive funk underneath the guitars, closer to the nervy groove of Gang of Four than the straight-ahead punk you might expect. Gurriers understand that protest music doesn't have to stand still with its fists clenched. Sometimes anger lands harder when the rhythm gets your body moving before your brain has caught up.

There are obvious reference points. Gilla Band can be heard in the way the guitars are treated as texture and violence rather than just riffs, and Sprints make a useful comparison for how anxiety and confrontation become something physical. But this record is too broad to stay inside those comparisons.

'Pins' proves it. Rather than hitting immediately, it loosens everything into a grungier, almost trip-hop atmosphere and lets Hoff sound more exposed than usual. There's swagger here as well as aggression, and it shows Gurriers are confident enough to know that heaviness doesn't always need maximum volume.

'Shades' goes the other way, throwing angular, industrial guitars into a hardcore chorus, while 'Drones' slowly builds the pressure so the eventual release feels far more violent because the band have made you wait for it.

Right in the middle of the record sits 'Today Is Not Enough', and it shows yet another side of the band. It opens on a guitar line that pulls you in, with Hoff leaning towards spoken word and a bass sound heavy enough to level a mountain. The industrial weight is there, but so is a shoegaze-leaning ache underneath it, a feeling of reaching for something that never quite seems to be enough. It proves the noise on this record isn't there just to be loud. It's there to sound the way the feeling does.

Some bands spend years trying to capture what makes them dangerous on stage and never quite manage it. Gurriers seem to have found a way remarkably early, and nowhere is that clearer than on 'Nothing Happens Twice' and 'Waiting For Fisher'.

'Nothing Happens Twice' keeps the force of their live shows while giving the chorus enough room to expand well beyond the basement venues that shaped their debut. It was inspired by Beckett's Waiting for Godot and dead internet theory, the idea that online spaces are increasingly filled with bots instead of people, and you can hear that mix of political unease, digital alienation and dark humour in it.

'Waiting For Fisher' is the one that really made me sit up. At three minutes, it's one of the shortest songs here and one of the most vicious: roaring bass, guitars that keep accelerating, and Hoff picturing friends worn down by work and by money eating away at their dreams. It edges right up to hardcore, and it's Gurriers at the outer limit of their intensity. The anger comes from something painfully ordinary, the sense of a life swallowed whole by a job, and the band throw everything at it. If 'Party Lines' makes you dance, this one makes you want to shout along.

They kick like a mule because Bowen and Humphrey understand that the answer isn't simply to make everything louder. The rhythm section, guitars and Hoff's vocal are given enough separation to make every collision matter.

The obvious comparison hanging over any ambitious young Irish guitar band right now is Fontaines D.C., particularly as Gurriers start talking openly about writing for bigger stages. But turning them into "the next Fontaines" does neither band any favours. What they share isn't sound, it's scale of ambition. Fontaines have spent their career moving through poetry, dub, hip-hop, shoegaze and cinematic songwriting. Gurriers feel more interested in pressure: political frustration, private instability and the feeling of something being squeezed until it has no choice but to burst.

That's why this second record feels so important. 'Come and See' often sounded as though every song had arrived already at boiling point. 'Nobody's Coming To Save You' understands that turning the temperature down now and then makes the next explosion land harder. The restraint of 'Pins', the slow build of 'Drones' and the groove underneath 'Party Lines' make the violent moments elsewhere feel more extreme.

Hoff's voice benefits from the extra space too. Some of his strongest moments come when he sounds bruised rather than furious. 'I Wish I Was' edges towards a power ballad without ever becoming conventional, building slowly before it hits a wall of sound. Closer 'Crybaby' gives his more melodic side room to come through and leaves the record sounding exhausted rather than victorious.

That variety matters, because ten tracks of permanent confrontation would flatten into one emotion. Instead, the album keeps finding different shapes for its anger. Sometimes it dances, sometimes it broods, sometimes it explodes, and sometimes a melody stretches far beyond what the debut suggested they were interested in.

There's very little about Gurriers that feels restrained, but there's a lot more control here, and that's what makes it such an impressive second record. They haven't abandoned the qualities that made 'Come and See' exciting. They've worked out how to enlarge them.

The sweaty basement is still buried inside these songs. You can hear it in Pierce Callaghan's drums, in the abrasion of the guitars, in the moments when Hoff sounds close to shredding his voice, and in the way the parts fight each other for space. Now, though, there's a festival field beyond it. That's what you want from a second album: not reinvention for its own sake, and not the debut again with a bigger budget, but growth. 'Nobody's Coming To Save You' has plenty of it while doubling down on the intensity that made Gurriers exciting in the first place.

Ireland currently has an absurd number of artists making music that feels urgent, distinctive and capable of travelling far beyond the country that produced it. Gurriers aren't simply benefiting from that moment. On this record, they sound capable of becoming one of the bands that defines it.

Standout tracks: ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’, ‘Pins’, ‘Nothing Happens Twice’, ‘Waiting for Fisher’

Best for fans of: Fontaines D.C., IDLES, Gilla Band, Sprints, Gang of Four, Geese