NewDad’s Julie Dawson on the catharsis of songwriting, Irish pride, and the band’s debut album
Ahead of the release of the band’s debut album, Madra, Sarah Gill sat down with NewDad frontwoman and lyricist Julie Dawson to chat about the transition from Galway to London, the evolution of their sound, and working alongside some of their own musical heroes.
When it comes to pinch-me moments, NewDad have had them in abundance over the last couple of years. NME cover stories, interviews with Rolling Stone, working with legends of the genre and becoming veritable hometown heroes, the Galway four-piece have just reached the biggest (and most anxiety-inducing) milestone of their music career with the release of their debut album, Madra.
“It probably sounds cliche,” Julie Dawson, the band’s frontwoman, lyricist, and guitar player tells me. “But Madra is all about being okay with feeling bad. It’s about those bad parts of yourself and your mistakes, and recognising that they’re all part of what it is to be human. It’s about sitting with those feelings and learning to be okay with it.”
The album digs into the inescapable anguish that seems part and parcel of existence, the state of tumult that follows you around like a dog as you grow into who you are. That message tracks across the album’s progression, starting out with ‘Angel’, which was inspired by the relationship between Rue and Jules on HBO’s Euphoria, to the more personal and achingly poignant ‘White Ribbons’, right through to the title track, ‘Madra’, which closes the album out with delicious distortion.
I wonder what it must feel like, to reach inside yourself and put word to the knot in your stomach, shining a light into those darker corners of your mind. “It was so cathartic for me,” Julie says. “Writing things down, getting it out of your head and neatly packaging things in a way that you can slot them into the back of your mind, it’s such a good way of processing things. I am so lucky to have songwriting, because it really does help me understand how I’m feeling. Listening back now, from a different place, it’s so nice to see how far I’ve come.”
“A lot of it is about some of the same themes — feeling isolated, lonely, not liking yourself very much. It wasn’t something intentional that I was trying to say through the album as a whole, but in a way it’s like a diary. Any time I write a song, I don’t really want to show anyone, but the longer I sit with them, the more confident and comfortable I become.”
When the band first began releasing music back in 2020, their sound traversed the marshy realms of dream-pop, shoegaze-y alternativeness, a DIY operation situated in Dawson’s bedroom. Now, having signed to Atlantic Records and recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios and with a sturdy team of genre heavyweights around them, they’ve dialed up their quintessential sound to eleven with cool handed assuredness. That same fuzzy and familiar sound is still there, but it’s got a heavy rock underbelly that keeps you interested through all eleven tracks.
Together with Cara Joshi on bass, Fiachra Parslow on drums and Sean O’Dowd on guitar, NewDad are positioning themselves to become one of Ireland (and Galway)’s prime exports, blurring the lines between genres and appealing to a broader listenership. Starting out as a music project to pass the time in secondary school (before Joshi stepped in for Áindle O’Beirn), the band’s genesis can be traced back to seeing Just Mustard onstage in Malahide, supporting The Cure.
The Dundalk band made them realise, wait, maybe they can actually do this, so they reached out to Just Mustard’s producer, Chris Ryan, and he’s been right there with them ever since. For Madra, mixing came from Alan Moulder, a man who’s worked on many of the albums that inspired the sound of NewDad. Slowdive, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, he’s a savant of shoegaze — does working with their musical heroes feel unsettlingly surreal, or cosmically correct?
“It really is the dream team. With Chris, he’s been there since the get go and he knows the music inside out. With Alan, our manager said he would reach out, just in case, and when he said he was interested in doing it, we were just so taken aback — he’s mixed and worked on our favourite records of all time! When we got the mixes back from him, we were just blown away, it was almost like we couldn’t believe we were listening to our own music. He’s an actual magician.”
The pinch-me moment that stands out to Julie beyond all the rest is playing support for Paolo Nutini at Malahide. “It was so full circle and it had always been a bucket list venue for us — being up onstage, when we had been down in the crowd looking up at Just Mustard just a few years before, it was definitely a ‘we’ve made it’ moment.” But what about up-and-coming talent?
“People really are looking at the music coming out of Ireland, like with Sprints and Cardinals, there is attention and it is achievable. To be fair, you don’t necessarily have to move to London, our EPs came from living in Shantalla, doing it all there and filming the music videos ourselves, and that in itself got us radio play in the UK. People are looking and people want to hear the music that’s coming out of Ireland.”
From the album title and visuals to the printing of the lyrics as Gaeilge on the vinyl sleeve, Irish language and mythology play a big part of Madra, aspects of their music that became more crucial once they moved to London. “When Irish people move to London, they’re suddenly ten times more Irish, but it was almost like a way for us to feel close to home again. When we were asked about our identity, it’s home and our upbringing and making Brigid’s crosses every year. They’re things from our past that we’ve picked up and plopped in our present as a way to stay connected to that part of ourselves,” Julia says over Zoom, a Saint Brigid’s cross floating just over her shoulder.
For me, Madra is an album of zero skips, one that moves from hazy head bangers to alt-rock noisiness, catching you in the throat with the poignancy of the lyrics buried beneath the layers of lush guitar. Julie closes out our call by telling me, and perhaps reminding herself, that they’ve come incredibly far, and it’s something to be celebrated. “Regardless of how caught up in the stress of the album release, we need to keep reminding ourselves to have that faith in ourselves and understand that we’ve done a lot and that’s something to be proud of. You know what? Go us.”
Imagery courtesy of Alice Backham and Zyanya Lorenzo.
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