modernlove.: "We didn't have the confidence but now we're not gonna shy away from showing the world"

Addressing timeless themes and now learning to write with intent - Indie rocking Irish four-piece talks new and old EPs, mastering a dynamic sound and previewing their fast-selling debut UK headline tour

By Tom Adams August 2022

"We did it for fun and that’s always been the way we’ve done it, and whenever it’s not fun then there’s no point in doing it anymore”

modernlove. (deliberately spelt without a capital letter, no space but a full stop) are full of sagacious mantras. It’s rare for any interview to hold the aura of an chat with two mates fused with an open therapy session but by speaking with so much honesty and assurance about their whirlwind seven years, it felt as if the conversation between frontman (Barry Lally) and drummer (Cian McCluskey) had been unwilfully gate-crashed. The charmingly playful, yet introspective, personalities of both Lally and McCluskey, completed by guitarist (Graham Fagan) and bassist (Danny Rooney) write songs based on their own personal experiences. From addressing themes of naïve teens discovering the heartbreak and hardships of growing up to the contemporary mental highs and lows in a post-pandemic world, the Drogheda-born indie-pop quartet’s dynamic discography takes listeners through an emotionally relatable journey, delicately balancing their optimistic, upbeat 80s sound with their more vulnerable side in the band’s newest EP in typically thoughtful, well… modernlove. style.

Just moments into our conversation it became quickly evident that the band represented an ensemble of four childhood friends doing what they love and truly living their dream. The constant back-and-forth wit and interrupting of each other never once fell untimed, and although their humility will never admit it, Barry and Cian are an exemplary product of how far two self-made musicians wanting to kickstart their own band at a boyish age can really go - regardless of its deliberate intent or not.

“So me and Barry have been friends since we were four or five” Cian explained. “We went to primary school together but we never played music together and then one day we started jamming out in a practice room–”

“More of a shed with a drum kit and guitar” joked Barry.

“And then from there we knew we needed a singer so I just kind of grabbed Barry by the collar and was like ‘you are now the singer of this thing we’re doing’ and he showed up and didn’t say a word so it took a while. Then Barry went away and learned how to play the guitar solely to do this band thing, but I think the key for us has always been that we were already friends before so it wasn’t like a conscious effort, we just happened to all like the same music. We always did it for fun and that’s always been the way we’ve done it”.

September last year marked the band’s release of their debut EP titled monochrome blue which went on to produce uplifting instrumental anthems such as their most popular track Liquorice (which recently surpassed one-million Spotify plays) with others more subtly masked by their bitter-sweet lyrical reality of facing the primary years of early adulthood present in I know it's tearing you apart. Subsequently, the mini-album doesn’t just represent the birth of the modernlove. collective written at a time of adolescent age themselves, but would also go on to define their teenage years.

“We had forever to write it,” Cian admitted. “It was a combination of five years of trial and error, writing a lot of terrible songs before we actually ended up having something we truly loved. We had a lot of time to think about it and make sure it was as cohesive as possible. We were also so close to each other to the point that any experience Barry wrote about on that first EP, the other three members of the band are just like 'oh yeah I remember that - I watched that happen to him”.

“The whole EP was written from a place with a lot of naivety”, Barry interjected. “I think we were all just writing about our first break-ups and how sad they all made us. All of the songs we had written weren’t necessarily for the purposes of that EP or with any in mind. It was kind of just everything we had written since we started playing together and I suppose that’s why it feels cohesive because it was these coming-of-age stories and narratives played out in the songs and falling in love and just being infatuated when you’re sixteen right up until twenty before becoming a young adult and all about navigating those experiences. It kind of feels like ‘the best of’ our teenage years and a lot of the most memorable and important moments to us that we wrote about. Liquorice is the one song off that isn’t necessarily about love. It’s truer to being a teenager and being out in those situations where you’re drinking probably more than you should, so it’s more about teenage infatuation I suppose, than just genuine true love so that’s maybe why there’s more of a playful kind of vibe to it.”

“It’s the one song that took us years to get right because we wrote it four different ways over a period of time so there’s a few different versions of it”, said Cian. "There are lyrics in it written in 2016 and there are lyrics that were written just a couple of weeks before we actually released it so that particular song expands quite a long length of time”.

It became clear that perfectionism had long been a key characteristic at the band’s core, yet remains a big part of what they're still pursuing. From amalgamating five years' worth of work before releasing their first EP, to explaining the unique spelling of the band’s name because according to McCluskey, they simply “care too much about stupid stuff like that”, in reflection modernlove. have always been a band that does care about the things that most bands do not.

“We like how certain things look and it’s for people who actually like the band and wonder ‘that’s cool, I wonder why they did that?’ It also feels more conversational, like reading the song titles you feel like maybe you can relate a bit more”.

“If we ever play a festival and they have us in all upper case, two separate words and no full stop then that could be anyone… it may not even be us!” replied Barry.

Yet the truth is no one could quite imitate the band’s rapturous guitar riffs embellished by progressive electronic beats and catchy lyrics with the same amount of conviction. modernlove. have an unorthodox-resonating, genre-fluid sound that has taken an abundance of influence from an expansive range of artists both new and old. And as Cian began to list each one - fourteen to be exact - it became all the more clearer just how influenced the band have been from an early age.

“There are so many bands we’ve taken things from. The 1975 were definitely a very formative band for us like when they first came out they really changed the game. I think everyone making music in 2013 acknowledged that they’d switched it up a lot. Then bands like Bombay Bicycle Club, Bloc Party, New Order, The Cure, Busted, Michael Jackson, even bands like Blink-182 for myself and Barry, plus Taking Back Sunday to artists like Elliott Smith for the acoustic singer-songwriter”. “Even the likes of U2 and My Chemical Romance as well! There’s also Prince and Joni Mitchell… there’s so many”, Barry added. “We really try to take from everywhere but it’s so hard to convey all of those influences when you only have two EPs”.

Eleven months after the first came the arrival of EP number two titled Oh My Mind released last month on Akira Records, announcing itself with all the jaunty melodies and infectious synths that made the previous effort so slick. However, with this mini-album came an even deeper dive into the band’s authentic song writing, especially in the opinion of Lally who feels this EP has taken on a more mature perception of the heavy subject matters layered deeply within each song.

“We have a lot more conviction about those sorts of things now. On the first EP we didn’t really touch on sadness properly like only as a break-up or whatever, but we had never gone in-depth into feelings and why we were feeling terrible so Oh My Mind takes that further about struggling mentally, and specifically over lockdown as well not knowing what was happening. I don’t think we would have written about that on the first EP, and even the song Islands was the second or third song we’d ever written but because it was about something so serious and close to home, we weren’t as comfortable releasing it on the first EP. We didn’t have the confidence but now we’re not gonna shy away from writing and showing the world those kinds of things”.

“I think we’re a lot more comfortable in our song writing skills now”, agreed Cian. “We have more confidence in how to say certain things or talk about certain topics like mental health struggles and family turmoil so we feel we can go further than just singing about breaking up with your girlfriend when you’re seventeen. That was the major difference on EP one to EP two”.

The predecessor featured songs written at a time of youthful buoyancy, but the second represents something far more conceptual. Written at a time of national lockdown, the album explores complex themes of isolation and existentialism with lyrics such as ‘you’re fine, you’re fine, tell yourself all the time, it’s just another rhetoric I hide behind’ on the track Take My Head depicting the powerfully relatable notion of trying to make sense of a time of uncertainty.

“I think that song in particular just summed up how we were all feeling over lockdown so it felt like a good way to round off the EP. Having reflected a lot, it represents not really feeling yourself at times as if your head has gone on a walkabout while you’re just stuck. We were saying that Oh My Mind and Take My Head are the two songs that are about feeling absolutely awful, and are the first and last song on the EP so we thought listening back that Oh My Mind was very 'I feel terrible' and then five songs listing the reasons why we felt terrible and then Take My Head was 'yeah… still feel terrible” described Barry.

Alongside the EP came the release of an energetic music video to accompany the song Oh My Mind which featured the four-piece cohesively dancing in pale white attire in a stark, bright-lit room in the presence a man growing repeatedly more irritated at the boys’ efforts. The video perhaps indicates a deeper message underneath, or alternatively, was the outcome of keeping four long-time friends inside away from each other for the last year or so...

“People keep asking us if the video is a metaphor but we actually didn’t intend on doing that and instead just wanted to create some funny video where we could dance. We had the idea for a long time! We thought how funny it would be for four people who really, really can’t dance to take this really seriously and learn the whole thing. But yeah we’re gonna pretend to be artsy and edgy at least… we’re just ten steps ahead you know” laughed Cian.

“I wish we could say that we even came up with the choreography but we didn’t”, confessed Barry. “It’s just funny how seriously we all took it. When it came the time to do it we all really wanted to look good. The video and the sonic aspect and composition is such a stark contrast to the narrative of the song and it works because that’s the way young people communicate their feelings when they’re not doing too good and almost joke about it and even make memes and shit instead of coming at it and approaching it seriously. That just isn’t the way we communicate our feelings to our friends, instead we just take the piss out of it and that’s why Oh My Mind kind of works in the way that it does because it is about such serious things but it’s also just one big piss-take”

“I think that sums us up… just one whole big piss-take!”

Irrespective of Lally and McCluskey’s banter, they convey an important point. The band grew up with a generation that uses humour to cope with adversity to the point where its meaning becomes disorientated between irony or sincerity. But for modernlove. music has often been the biggest antidote at times of stagnation. When it came to writing the second EP things were different. The project was a collection of the band's early work mixed in with some of the new, and according to Cian, writing songs knowing that people will listen to them more this time round is still something of an unfamiliar sensation.

“You write a different way for something when you know it’s gonna come out because you know people are gonna hear it at some point so you spend a lot more time. Usually it would take us like a year to finish a song… like no one cares!”

“There were definitely more songs written for the second one”, Barry explained. "Us was the first song we ever wrote, but most of the songs were written right before the EP was made so there was a bit more intention behind it. We knew we had all the time in the world to finish songs on our previous one because we weren’t releasing them with intent so no one was going to hear them for some time. But we knew the songs we were writing for this EP were going to be on it so immediate decisions had to be made. There’s a couple of nostalgic songs about falling in love when you’re young, songs about a time when we were kids, and songs written by us as adults so there’s a nice mix written from a more mature point of view”.

The album really is a declaration of growing up and it’s plausible to claim the songs on the second EP feel like a direct response to some of those present on the band's first. Prior to its release, the production of the second EP gave the quartet the opportunity to reach another big landmark: recording their first studio album in some of London’s iconic studios.

"It’s so nice to be in a studio, especially with more talented people than us, and be able to instantly get the sound you’re looking for because we usually have quite a clear vision of where we’d like to take something to have people sit down with us in our studio and say ‘we can do that’, or ‘we can do all this’ so it’s been a big change from making EPs on our laptops in a bedroom”, Cian remarked.

“It was a real milestone that we always wanted to reach as a band”, explained Barry as his face lit up with excitement. “After COVID we were even more driven. It was the first time we’d travelled to record an EP as our first one was recorded during lockdown so it was quite lonely just remotely recording parts and then sending them off so it was a lot more exciting to travel and actually meet the people working on our stuff and have far more communication than on the first EP so it felt cool to actually be in the room with them together. Although money helps… even just a bit!”

But the Drogheda-born four really do deserve this. Working with producer and mixer Tom Leach (who has previously worked with the likes of Lewis Capaldi and The Streets), in addition to Kevin Tuffy and Adam Redmond is an indication of just how far the band has come.

“Working with Tom Leach was great, and also Adam Redmond - he’s a genius”, said Cian. “They both really elevated the songs because we’re all absolute control freaks and it takes a lot for us to trust someone else because we’ve been burned one too many times with terrible mixers so we really needed to trust the people we were working with. When you’re willing to die on a hill and state ‘that keyboard must stay in’ and then someone just comes in and says ‘yeah I took it out… it’s gone’ and then the song is finished and you realise they were right. I think we’ve now found a team we’d love to continue working with in the future, they allow us to be as creative as possible and then tidy up any of the loose ends that we may have”.

“When you’re that close and the music is so personal to you, it becomes really hard to actually finish the songs. But when you’re working with other people who are on deadlines and need to be paid then decisions need to be made”, admitted Barry.

Collaborating with such renowned producers and mixers brings even more confidence, and for both McCluskey and Lally, their input has encouraged the band to experiment beyond their more typically recognisable indie-pop sound.

“Me and Danny have always been huge fans of UK house-garage music, such as artists like Tim Green, Jon Hopkins, Burial and all these amazing house artists that have really inspired us”, Cian replied. “We take a lot of inspiration in our production from people like them when we’re creating an ambient sound that surrounds our music, even in our indie songs. We like to be very atmospheric, then I was going through this phase of only writing drum and bass songs for a long time and I wrote a demo for Take My Head and then everyone in the band said ‘stop writing these songs now, that’s enough… we’ll use this one if you stop’. So I was like ‘okay we’ll go with that!’ It’s definitely an indication that we’re always gonna do whatever we want to do at the time and whenever we want to do something like that again then we will”.

“I think that aspect of the band will always be present in everything we do. That has always been there, even in lmk from the EP previous and then aspects of it in our new one with Familiar that has a more electronic and dance vibe to it”, added Barry.

When asked whether their recent dancing of the Oh My Mind video will feature on tour, Cian was jokingly frank: “you’ll have to buy a ticket and find out”. But regardless of if the dancing makes its return, November marks the moment many excited UK fans will get the chance to see the modernlove. ensemble live for the first time as they embark on their debut UK headline tour. Starting in Germany, then to the Netherlands, Glasgow to then two nights at London’s Camden Assembly, before later playing the Button Factory in Dublin with a number of domestic shows in-between (many of which are already sold out), it's clear the band are already eager for the arrival of their Autumn tour to begin.

“It’s the first actual tour we’re going on and it’s another milestone for us”, explained Barry. “When we were playing music together we’ve always thought, ‘imagine actually going on tour and people actually coming to see us!’ Especially when we put those tickets on sale, we had no preconception we’d be selling any of them. With it being lockdown the past two years, we’d been releasing music constantly but there was no way to tell if there was anyone listening back on the other end. It has kind of just throwing music out into the ether, so being able to announce it and seeing places immediately sell out has made us realise there has been people there the whole time invested, and this has all been for something”.

Cian was unsurprisingly in agreement, “adding dates and upgrading venues was something we would have never thought in a million years that on our first tour we’d be doing anything like that. It has actually really humbled us a lot like it’s insane that we get to do this. You put out music and then sit in your room for like three months because you can’t go anywhere so we would work really hard on this music but had to stay inside and couldn’t play gigs or really do anything, so to actually know that we’re going on tour and that people are gonna show up and for us to see the growth we’ve had is gonna be good!”

Now with two EPs to their name and a debut headline tour around the corner, it feels like a deservedly exciting time for the four Irish stalwarts. Fully immersed within their most important year yet, modernlove. are just getting started. Redefining their nostalgic indie-rock genre with alternative, synth-pop inspiration, the band are writing with more confidence than ever before and are almost ready to charm Europe, even if they don't quite believe it themselves... yet.

Check out modernlove.'s full discography on Spotify now.