If there were any justice or logic in the music ecosystem, you’d already know who Silverbacks are. Emerging amidst the “post-punk” boom that swept Dublin and London late last decade, Silverbacks haven’t gained the global notoriety contemporaries like Fontaines D.C. or Black Midi have enjoyed, yet have steadily built an enviable catalog of three razor-sharp albums in five years. Boasting brainy and wry lyrics, a bottomless supply of indelible hooks, all killer no filler songwriting, and a three-guitar interplay both alchemical and economical, they have all the trademarks of an indie band grown in a lab for maximum impact. You’d be forgiven for taking the title of their new album, Easy Being A Winner, as a bit of not-undeserved-but-slightly-delusional braggadocio.
Silverbacks being the self-aware and sardonic Irish songwriters they are, that title is delivered with a smirk and a wink. Despite some healthy online buzz in their earliest days, things didn’t exactly go to plan for the group. After bouncing between potential label deals delayed their debut Fad, the album dropped right into the middle of the 2020 pandemic summer — like many emerging artists, Silverbacks felt cut off at the knees right when they were trying to get started. Stop-start arcs ran into the growing responsibilities of Real Life as the band’s members eased deeper into their 30s. After hurriedly following Fad with Archive Material in early 2022, the band took a moment to breathe and figure out what would come next.
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“We didn’t make this record to distance ourselves from post-punk,” lead singer and guitarist Daniel O’Kelly says over Zoom, reflecting on the experimentation that begat Easy Being A Winner. Like many of their peers, Silverbacks have bemusedly chafed against being boxed in by the catch-all moniker. Yet as he and drummer Gary Wickham detail in our conversation, Easy Being A Winner was another logical step in Silverbacks steadily honing their craft and expanding their sound. It’s the fullest portrait of the band’s capabilities yet: An indie free-for-all, a vast array of ideas and textures colliding in a sound that’s immediately lovable before it worms its way deeper and deeper into your brain upon further listens.
Silverbacks (Credit: Róisín Murphy O’Sullivan)
Having originally formed the first iteration of Silverbacks as a teenage home recording project with his brother and co-vocalist/co-guitarist Kilian, Dan O’Kelly is used to him and his sibling constantly working on music. With a vast supply of demos, there could always be another Silverbacks album on the horizon. Instead, the band took longer than their usual year and a half between albums with Easy Being A Winner, working off a host of fresh ideas. “We didn’t put as much internal pressure on ourselves,” Wickham explains. A long searching period allowed the band to push the edges of their sound, and settle into a proper recording session with their longtime collaborator, Gilla Band member and producer Daniel Fox.
Though Silverbacks aren’t traversing the globe on tour, they’ve had some material success. The more luxuriant recording process for Easy Being A Winner was partially funded by some lucrative sync deals, namely a Brioni commercial in which Brad Pitt lounges around to the tune of early Silverbacks highlight “Dunkirk.” “Thank you, BP!” O’Kelly cracks with his customary dryness. “He’s just calling me there. He wants to give me more money but I told him to fuck off.”
Once more, Silverbacks gathered in Dublin to work on Fox’s home turf. At this point, their relationship with the producer allowed him to challenge them to leave no stone unturned. And, at other points, challenge them in some more comical ways. O’Kelly cracks about how Fox — coming from the heavily altered, pedal-assisted sounds of Gilla Band — called the O’Kellys’ lack of gear “shocking.” “He was disgusted with us,” O’Kelly deadpans. “He spat on me as well. I went out and bought three pedals after that.”
It was evolution by way of a reclamation of Silverbacks’ origins. O’Kelly talks about how the process echoed the freeform, exploratory approach he and Kilian adopted as teenagers, and how the resulting sound was closer to some multi-faceted “indie” he always imagined the band leaning into. Silverbacks also expanded to a sextet, welcoming old friend Paul Leamy in on bass, so Emma Hanlon could focus on keys and take on a more prominent role as vocalist. With Peadar Kearney remaining as a third guitarist, the group set them up for a denser, more varied sound with several multi-instrumentalists capable of bringing the finely carved details of Easy Being A Winner to life.
From its opening moments, Easy Being A Winner strikes a balance: Silverbacks chasing something new without abandoning their core ethos. Opener “Selling Shovels” coasts on roadworn acoustic guitar, while marrying Tom Verlaine guitar affectations with a drumbeat the band intended as equal parts motorik and “L.A. Woman.” One of the songs penned by Dan O’Kelly, it showcases his penchant for capturing the loose energy of a mind wandering through the world in the 2020s — first inspired by reading Wikipedia profiles of old dictators and always scrolling to the bottom to see how they died before anything else, leading to an NFT conference in New York where a Frenchman grabbed him and said “You know who will make the most money out of this shit? The people selling shovels.” “And I never saw him again,” O’Kelly says with mock gravity.
Afterward, Easy Being A Winner fires off in all kinds of directions. The subsequent single “Giving Away An Inch Of” was them filtering Fleetwood Mac through their own lens, a relationship song led by Hanlon’s sighing coo instead of the O’Kellys’ drawls and barks. While there are a few chugging rockers — the scuzzy, infectious “No Rivers Around Here” most notably — more of the album features new horizons, like the dance-y “Something I Know” assisted by the O’Kellys’ father on clarinet. On songs like “Hide Away” or “Songs About Divide,” the sextet focuses on their softer side, floating on piano and synth atmospherics rather than the mathematic guitar cascade with which Kilian often fuels their music. Yet all of it fits, portraying a band more comfortable with who they are and what they want to achieve.
“We got past the pressure of ‘not making it,’” Wickham explains. “It’d be very difficult to say yes to even a massive deal that’d put us on the road forever at this point. When you realize that, it makes it easier.”
When Silverbacks cohered in the late ‘10s, half its members were pushing or older than 30 already. In the very beginning, perhaps they would’ve given the old rock ’n’ roll mythology a swing. But now, life has happened. Kilian and Hanlon are married; Dan is married and living with his wife and child in Paris, removed from the rest of the band back in Ireland. Families, buying a home, steady jobs — all that normal life stuff became the priority, which in turn allowed the band to settle into whatever it wanted to be.
It’s not that the idyllic home life has dulled Silverbacks’ existential acumen, though. Kilian’s songs tend to traverse more explicitly emotional territory — he and Hanlon have been together over a decade already despite having only recently tied the knot, and he draws upon their relationship to observe and dissect how humans interact with and make sense of each other over long stretches of time. Dan’s songs lean more observational, witty slice-of-life depictions of strange scenes and interactions he collects along the way. “Life’s good across from the sex shop/ Everything’s much less lonely,” he sings in “Hide Away,” a song about a Paris apartment near Gare Du Nord from which he could watch commuters stop into a sex shop before the work day. This time around, many of Dan’s songs derive from similar threads, the new life he’s made in Paris and navigating an expat existence.
Silverbacks albums are always a tapestry of different ideas and themes, vignettes more than a clean narrative. But if there’s something you can pull out of Easy Being A Winner, it’s this overarching sense of home — the long-term family of the band, the families they’re starting outside, the way they have grown into themselves as artists at the same time that they are parsing new chapters in their individual lives.
“We’re happier with where the band is at,” Wickham says. “We want to do well and want people to hear it, but we’re looking at it in a healthier way.”
“You start to figure it out,” O’Kelly sings in the album’s closing title track. “Easy Being A Winner” is actually one of the oldest songs on the album, having kicked around for four or five years prior. Kilian wrote it about Bobby Kennedy, and how the Kennedy’s father “prepared them for greatness.” The whole idea behind it was you could see the path, follow the steps, and, well, win. It concludes the album on almost an inverted note of classic rock triumphalism — a rollicking Thin Lizzy-esque jam, briefly ascending to fireworks at its climax before, instead, riding off on a groove loose and calm and unhurried. It feels symbolic. A band that still has the fire, but also the patience and contentment that, hopefully, comes with age.
Resurrecting an old song about taking over the world at this juncture in Silverbacks’ career has a bit of irony to it — one not lost on the band. But for O’Kelly, it also opened the door for some earnest reflection.
“Your idea of greatness shifts as you go through life,” he concludes. “Now, to me, it’s a pint with my friends. It’s holding on to the strongest relationships you have and that make you happy. That’s where we are now. We’re not trying to prove anything.”
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