Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

For a moment in time half a decade ago, Slyrydes were one of the big, emerging names on Ireland’s post-punk landscape. An incendiary live band, the four-piece burst out of Galway on a wave of insistent, noisy guitar music and visceral, biting vocals. Their words were crafted and delivered by Mark Raftery, or Rafto as he is commonly known, on a range of topics from mental health and addiction to loss.

This week, Slyrydes’ debut album, What Happens if You Get Happy, arrived into the world. Irreverent and unflinching, Rafto is the perfect iconoclast through its tracks, full of heart and energy to match the controlled aggression of the instrumentals.

Despite sounding as fresh and pulsating as any new record could hope to, this is a case of arrested development – What Happens if You Get Happy should have been released years ago.

“It’s a good thing,” Rafto says. “It is very strange though. Had this come out when we did it in 2020, it would feel like [we were] part of the record. Now, there’s a bit of a separation. It doesn’t feel quite like something I did anymore, because of the length of time. I hadn’t even listened to it in three or four years.”

Eoin Reilly, guitarist in the band, was the catalyst for the record eventually reaching an audience. He reached out to Rafto, with Slyrydes in the midst of a long hiatus.

Artists sometimes talk about feeling detached from songs in their early discography, and there is a touch of that with What Happens if You Get Happy.

“First of all, I was impressed by it,” Rafto says of hearing the album again.

“I thought it was good. Had it come out when we’d just recorded it, I might’ve been a bit blasé about the whole thing, but I actually think it’s a decent piece of work. You have to remember, it was recorded pre-covid. I like to think that the album was a bit observational, but the snapshot that it was made in is completely gone.

Pictured: Slyrydes…Galway band’s debut album out now.