The release of the noisy punks’ second LP follows a period of sharp change, marked by the departure of two of their original members, but the remaining trio have emerged unscathed.
The title is not what it seems. Something Soft, the second album from the Irish group M(h)aol (pronounced like “mail”), is a jagged, fretful record—which, for anyone who listened to its predecessor, 2023’s Attachment Styles, won’t come as a surprise. This is M(h)aol’s niche: a snarl, a scream, a stamp. The band, at their best, are a means to exorcism and a collective through which the anger and frustration of its members can be released, because the world can be nasty. Sometimes, a wry joke, a roll of the eyes, and a shriek can help to deal with that fact.
The weather on the morning I meet with the band’s Constance Keane is incongruous, in light of the record we were to discuss. It’s a hot and fragrant sort of day in late April, in a pleasant part of London filled with stylish people and innumerable coffee shops. At the table next to us, in the patio area of one such coffee place, a woman happily tells the man opposite her about how her acting career has been going. It’s possible they too are conducting an interview for a culture website, which rather speaks to the general vibe of the day. It’s sunny, and the artistic types of London are out and about, and in very good form.
Keane is M(h)aol’s founding member and its drummer but, for this record, she became the band’s lead vocalist too. It’s been a time of change for them since Attachment Styles, as two members, Róisín Nic Ghearailt and Zoe Greenway, have moved on, leaving behind Keane, Sean Nolan, and Jamie Hyland—the same “Jamie” as in the title of Gilla Band’s first record, Holding Hands With Jamie—to continue as a trio, albeit with help from a friend, Sarah Deegan, who appears on Something Soft and has been accompanying the band on stage. “They’re dropping like flies,” Keane laughs, fairly at ease with the band’s reconfiguration, though not entirely without trepidation and a sense of whiplash. It’s always difficult for a group when a member leaves, but two disappearing—one of whom was the frontperson—is understandably more disorientating.
“I was scared,” Keane admits. “It’s hard to—I was gonna say to ‘step into the role,’ but you can’t step into the role of what Róisín did. She’s so good at it. At the same time, there was very little back and forth about whether or not we would keep going. When anybody leaves, you do an initial check around the room, being like, ‘Okay, is everybody sure they actually want to be here? Because this is going to be a bit of an uphill struggle for a little while.’” She knows that there will be comparisons between her and Ghearailt, but the band has had conversations about the transitional place M(h)aol will be in while deciding how to present themselves in the interim and after.
The remaining trio, despite being based in different cities across Ireland and the UK, remained committed to the project and made Something Soft, which, despite the loss of two core members, manages to retain the distinct texture of the band’s original sound. For that, Keane credits Hyland, who has recorded all of M(h)aol’s releases so far. “A lot of our actual sound is coming from Jamie,” she explains. “She produces everything that we do, and a lot of the musicality of the band is her vision. If she left, there would have been a very, very different record.” She pauses. “Maybe there wouldn’t have been a record, to be honest.”
Something Soft sets out its stall early. The promise of softness implied by the title, or by the album’s sleeve, which depicts a happy cat staring out of an open window, is immediately hardened by the first track, “Pursuit,” which pulls us into a dark night on a not-quite-empty street. Keane, as the narrator of the song, is walking along on her own, clutching her keys hard in her hand, criss-crossing the road, standing straighter—in the hope that the stance imbues her profile with a more masculine quality, all in response to the weight of a presence behind her back, tracking her movements. “If I run really fast,” she sings, “will I make it to my bed?”
The scene is sickeningly vivid and, while it is likely one that women will recognize with total clarity and experience, I listen to it as a man who does not ordinarily feel burdened by the possibility of violence, simply for walking home alone at night. In truth, it often takes the women in my life telling me, very directly, about their experiences with situations like the one “Pursuit” depicts before I become fully alert to them. It’s quite a shit thing to realize about yourself but, from my perspective, that is part of what makes “Pursuit” so compelling, in addition to the satisfying moment when Keane’s drums come in. The plain way the story is told is confronting. There is, as a listener, no hiding from it. “My favorite types of lyrics are very direct,” Keane says. “Flowery language doesn’t do anything for me.”
M(h)aol’s words and music can make for uncomfortable listening, but therein lies their appeal: We live in uncomfortable times. Escape and distraction can be wonderful things in music but, sometimes, it’s validating to hear our anger and anxiety expressed plainly for us by the artists we enjoy. This is the role M(h)aol serves. They do not smooth their edges, nor pander to an audience that may seek something gentler. “We make the music as a coping mechanism for ourselves, and it’s a bonus if anybody likes it,” Keane says. “When I’m writing, I’m not thinking, ‘This is going to change somebody’s mind about X, Y, and Z.’ It feels like an authentic representation of what I am thinking or feeling inside my body. It’s as if somebody has scooped out part of my brain and pressed it onto a record.”
The song “Snare” is, certainly, a part of Keane’s brain pressed onto a record, an expression of how pissed off she is with being spoken down to as a drummer, which, as people have pointed out to her since childhood, is a decidedly male role to play in a band. “I did my first drum lesson on my ninth birthday,” she recalls. “I’m so lucky that my mom is not somebody who would have ever considered the gendering of an instrument or anything like that. There were no questions asked about whether that’s the instrument I should be playing or not, which made it really confusing when, around the preteen point, suddenly everybody starts really caring about gender. That was the point where, yeah— strange stuff would be said to me, like, ‘You’re not a boy, so why do you play the drums?’
“As an adult, or even as a later teen, it’s much easier to be like, ‘Fuck you.’ Or to just be like, ‘What a strange question to ask. Why are you asking that question? What do you mean by that?’ Having the person have to actually question their own preconceived notions—that’s probably more effective than telling someone to go fuck themselves.”
The gendering of particular objects, sounds, and works of art is, obviously, absurd, but it unquestionably happens all the time. There are odd presumptions built into our culture, and while “Snare” focuses on Keane’s specific experience with her instrument, the song speaks to a much wider phenomenon. I tell her about a deep memory from my own childhood, when, aged seven or so, I wanted to rent Spice World, the Spice Girls movie, from my local video rental shop and was denied the privilege by the person behind the counter, on the basis that it was “not for boys.” I was deeply embarrassed by being told that, so much so that the memory remains vivid enough that I am now recounting it in an article, more than 20 years later. These things leave their mark.
“Great movie,” Keane says, before we get to the serious point. “Great movie. Cinema. It’s cinema.” We take a minute to enthuse about Spice World, because I did eventually get to see it at a female friend’s house. But, after a brief and giddy recount of the film’s finest moments, we get back on track. “It’s actually a very common experience,” she says. “What you just told me there, that’s the exact type of conversation I’ve been having since putting out ‘Snare.’ How [experiences like that] actually shape a very heteronormative idea of what a boy and what a girl is. It can be really difficult to untangle that, if you’re not making a conscious effort to.”
Times have changed since Keane and I were children, but this sort of insidious nonsense is obviously still around, and it has followed Keane around before and throughout her time in M(h)aol—an angry punk band, which, of course, falls squarely within the domain of men. “The reason I started M(h)aol was because I was playing shows with another project beforehand, and I was getting so angry with the stuff that was being said to me. I would be setting up my kit, and I would be getting coached through it. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been told to tune my snare differently. I’d have to be like, no, I’ve done it so that it’s tuned quite low on purpose. I want a low, dead sound. That makes sense for this music. And they’d be like, yeah, I just think it’s better if it’s tuned higher. I don’t think I would ever think it’s my business to go up and tell anybody of any gender that they should be making their art differently like that.”
I ask, “Perhaps people like this are just know-it-all shitheads, who would condescend fellow musicians of any gender?” No, Keane says. It was the gender thing. “We have a guy in our band, Sean. He was constantly seen as the spokesperson for the band at soundchecks. He was the beacon of musical knowledge, as far as sound engineers were concerned. They would always go straight to him, especially about drum setup stuff. At a certain point, he just started pointing to me, not even explaining anything. Just… pointing.”
The world is ridiculous and anger-inducing and, particularly at this moment, it can be easy to slip into despair and frustration. But the gloom is to be resisted, and we can do that through the company of the people we love and the art that moves us. M(h)aol make music for themselves and for each other but, by releasing it, they allow their fans to take what they need from it. The sound is hard and sharp, made by some friends trying to work through the nonsense together. Maybe that’s the “something soft” that the title implies. “I find releasing music quite difficult sometimes,” Keane admits, as we finish up our morning chat under the sun. “But I feel so held by Jamie and Sean that I’m really not anxious about this.” A final sip of coffee. “It’s gonna be fun.”
