We’re extremely excited to have Madra Salach live in Stoke for the first time Saturday April 3rd 2027.

Madra Salach are six of them, out of Dublin’s Northside, most friends since their early teens: Banks on vocals, Lawlor on bass, Adam Cullen on guitar, Jack Martin on mandolin, whistle and synth, Maxime Arnold on harmonium, and Dara Duffy on drums. The name means dirty dog. Gorta is the debut they expect everything after it to be measured against.

“I’m proud of the EP and what it did,” Banks says, “but I’d like to think that when people talk about this band, they start with this album.”

Banks, Cullen and Duffy were a trad three-piece playing standards in Raheny pubs. Off to one side, Banks and Martin were feeding those same old songs through synths and tape loops. “The idea was to take traditional Irish songs and rearrange them with ambient tape loops, that kind of thing,” says Banks. “It was a niche concept that excited us. And then we were writing originals as well, and it just broadened and broadened.”

Many have rightly reached for a comparison to Lankum, but ØXN may be nearer the mark. Radie Peat’s other outfit pushes the darkness in folk further and builds it into a sealed dramatic world of its own, and that’s the ghost estate Gorta haunts, too. ‘Hunger,’ a song about the thing that kills, arrives dressed in a whack-fol-the-diddle singalong.

‘Ribbon Factory’ is a resounding way in. Penned by Cullen and recorded with Loren Humphrey in New York, it’s the song they’ve carried longest. Banks remembers hearing it arranged for the first time and saying, half-joking, “this is the only rock and roll you’re going to get.” It’s the last song on the record with its head still on. Everything after it is run from the gut.

The EP did the unlikeliest thing for a debut: reaching the top three of the Irish albums chart and the UK independent top ten, with 6 Music support and a Maida Vale session behind it. A summer of festivals followed, along with a support slot with Kneecap and a place on the Shane MacGowan tribute record.

None of it has filled the hunger that got them here, and that’s the point.

General Sale live Friday 23rd October @ 10AM