On Archive Material, Silverbacks Expand Even While Documenting Constrictive Times

You could be forgiven for having heard Fad, the 2020 full-length debut of Dublin quintet Silverbacks, and filing them away in your mind as “Irish post-punk band.” Dropping bands into such reductive buckets is a necessary evil of discovering, engaging with and evaluating new music—if you can’t boil a sound down into a distinct data point, putting it in the proper context becomes a much taller task. For their part, Silverbacks—brothers Daniel (vocals/guitar/percussion) and Kilian O’Kelly (vocals/guitar), Emma Hanlon (vocals/bass), Peadar Kearney (guitar) and drummer Gary Wickham (drums/percussion)—are unconcerned with how their band is defined, even if they may happen to disagree with it. It’s that disinterest in painting by numbers that defines Archive Material, their second album, returning Fad producer Daniel Fox (of Gilla Band, fka Girl Band), and their first for Full Time Hobby. Listeners who come looking for that Irish post-punk band they liked will find it, but they’ll also encounter an added emphasis on sonic diversity and nuance, the smooth surface they’d committed to memory enriched by unexpected wrinkles.
As if to reassure us of this, Silverbacks open Archive Material with the blistering three-track stretch of singles “Archive Material,” “A Job Worth Something” and “Wear My Medals.” Here, the band’s three guitars function less like guerrilla warriors and more like guided missiles—where on Fad, you may have been surprised by the mathy riffage that unexpectedly ends “Dunkirk,” or the wiry bent notes that punctured the verses of “Just in the Band,” the opening stretch of Archive Material is defined by sheer precision and force. The title track screeches to a stop after each chorus, with Daniel O’Kelly and Hanlon’s French vocals (“Ils s’entendent pas,” they insist, meaning roughly, “They don’t get along”) giving way to call-and-response guitars that sound like rock ‘n’ roll morse code. “A Job Worth Something” lays a Hanlon/Wickham foundation before incorporating dual lead guitars that later dominate the track entirely. “Wear My Medals” screams through your speakers, wielding a hard-charging two-note riff like defibrillator paddles. Silverbacks sound more determined and purposeful even in their stylistic sweet spot, pushing their broken-glass guitars to the limit, rather than simply resting on them.