M(h)aol Reach For Something Soft
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.
Photo by Cait Fahey
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.”