Dublin-based indie punk/alt rock band Silverbacks have returned with their new single “Selling Shovels” and its accompanying video.
The song, rcorded with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox is out now and marks their first release since 2022 sophomore effort ‘Archive Material’. Get it here.
Scrappy guitar harmonics usher in a rolling slice of wonky guitar pop, atop which vocalist Daniel O’Kelly’s delivers a staccato admission to a natural impatience / morbid curiosity.
As he explains: “The idea for these lyrics came from a habit I have – maybe everyone does it? When reading a historical figure’s wikipedia page I often lose interest and so I jump straight to the ‘personal life’ and ‘death’ part of the page to see how they died and the circumstances they were in at the time. The lyrics flicker between mundane distractions and fairly horrific images of war. Selling Shovels is a reference to ‘selling shovels during the gold rush’.“
With ‘Selling Shovels’, the band continues on the course set out by their previous two albums. However, with some time since the pandemic, where these records were sandwiched—and had an inadvertent and negative formative effect—the band has a clearer air and a lighter touch, born of a combination of musical and personal settling down.
Watch /listen below.
Catch the band live:
AUGUST
23-25 Féile Na Gréine, Limerick, Ireland
OCTOBER
19 Workman’s Club, Dublin, Ireland
20 Coughlan’s, Cork, Ireland
24 YES Basement, Manchester, UK
25 Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield, UK
26 Shacklewell Arms, London, UK
Silverbacks are Daniel O’Kelly (Vocals/Guitar), Kilian O’Kelly (Guitar/Vocals), Emma Hanlon (Vocals/Bass), Paul Leamy (Bass), Peadar Kearney (Guitar), and Gary Wickham (Drums).
