Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

With a wildly expansive sound and an ambitious, theatrical live show, New Ceremony have been one of the more explosive fixtures of the Galway band scene post-Covid. The four-piece, who can be broadly described as a blend of new-wave, post-punk and disco, have been on the go in some capacity since 2018, but regular gigs and an established line-up have informed a broader and more dynamic catalogue of songs in the last year or two.

This Saturday New Ceremony are set to release their debut single Lies, marking the occasion with a launch party gig in the Róisín Dubh that evening.

The song offers an idea of the early framework the band used to grow into their sound. As frontman Conor Geoghegan explains, the single is a product of the journey that has been the last five years.

“It all started in 2018 when Stephen Kearney invited me to go jamming with himself and Níall Curran,” he recalls.

“They’d been jamming since they were kids and they invited me along after seeing me in a play I wrote and performed a while back. We made a lot of noise in the Forge that summer and then we started writing songs.

“We needed to get a bassist so in 2019 we got Sean Connolly Bracken – a polymath by any standard. He’s a fantastic keys player, great bass player and great musician all around. He joined the team, and he was really good at bringing a more comprehensive musical structure to what we were doing.

“We got our first gig in the Cellar in 2019 – The Holy Show was our name at the time – and then of course, the big C hit and put a stall on all that.

“We started gigging again as soon as we could. We got the gig with the Black Gate, the Booley Sessions, at the end of 2021, and that was a great calling card for what we do. It’s still up on YouTube and we got more gigs [as a result]. John O’Connor of A Modern Movement gave us gigs and we played Áras na nGael… a gig on a farm in Roscommon.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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