With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk. Nice and angsty does it every time in my book.
It’s still shoegazey, still rueful, but the music made by Julie Dawson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sean O’Dowd (lead guitar), and Fiachra Parslow (drums) has become more expansive, the ache in the songs more pronounced. The gleaming production by Sam Breathwick (aka Shrink), who contributed the programming, synths, and bass, and is joining NewDad on their current tour, frequently erected a wall of sound; aurally, at least, it could fill a stadium. (Pictured below: Parslow, Dawson, O'Dowd)
Like their compatriots Fontaines DC, NewDad – who signed to Atlantic in 2023 – made an uneasy move to London and relentless international gigging. The experience left Dawson, the group’s creative force, with a lyrically fruitful existential crisis, a yearning for her beloved Galway (the altar in question) and her mum, and burning resentment at the demands made on her and her bandmates by the rock industry.
She doesn’t mention “the suits” or the promoters specifically, but they're there in the background, urging whatever it is they urged on her, dollar signs rolling in their eyes. As on Madra's songs of blighted teen romance, Dawson’s Altar offerings (some doubling as love songs) reveal her complicity and her masochistic streak.
There are sinister hints of the indignities that women are subjected to in the music biz. “Knees on the floor/ Bend a little bit more/ Break the way that you want me to/ I’ll still be your entertainer,” she sings on “Entertainer”. And on “Sinking Kind of Feeling”: “‘Cause there’s one more heaven/ More than one hell/ And I saw one of the latter/ In that cheap hotel.” What happened there? We shouldn't want to know.
So it’s no surprise that Dawson resists the bullshit, bawling the word “hate” on the scathing “Roobosh”, as if she were Poly Styrene or Siouxsie Sioux, the track eliciting some of O’Dowd, Parslow, and Shrink’s fiercest playing. It's thrilling – and mocks the idea that Dawson’s vocal range is limited, as if it was as angelic as Julee Cruise's or as girlish as Cranes singer Alison Shaw's. As with Elizabeth Fraser and Curve’s Toni Halliday, Dawson’s voice will evolve, take on new shadings. Given the maturation in her writing and NewDad’s music, the world is their oyster.
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