An indie band from Ireland who names their debut album with a Kurt Vonnegut reference is eventually going to wind up on this website. I don’t make the rules. Virgins might have wound up here anyway becuase the music is great, but a record named Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful will moved them up in the queue.
The first I heard the band was last week when the new single “g l i s s” was released:
It alternates between grungy and delicate, with an energy missing from many of their contemporaries. It’s fantastic stuff. It fits right in with the album from earlier this year, with good reason. From the Bandcamp page for the song:
Previously unreleased, only available as a download when you pre-ordered the album ‘nothing hurt and everything was beautiful’. ‘g l i s s’ was the first song written following the EP ‘transmit a little heaven’, which means the song is a sonic clue that bridges the gap between the what came before and what was to follow.
I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to call Virgins a shoegaze band, or it’s certainly not the term I’d use to describe this album. The first song on Nothing Hurt, “S O F T E R” has the reverb-heavy vocal and thick guitars, but again, there’s so much energy here:
Even the songs that adhere more closely to what I tend to think of as ‘shoegaze’ channel more 90s alt-rock or grunge than Slowdive or MBV. Here’s “A D O R E”, which somehow feels like something from Siamese Dream:
The production is so polished — no two songs sound alike, but each is distinctively Virgins. This is especially surprising given that the record appears to have been recorded after hours at a pub rather than in a proper studio. Love it.
Another favourite on the record is “S U N S P O T S”, another song with Smashing Pumpkins-adjacent guitar sounds, and a catchy chorus:
It’s a short record — only 8 tracks (9 if you count “g l i s s”, I guess), but the melodies and textures make it easy to come back to regularly.
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