Hailing from rural County Mayo, NERVES are an exciting new force on the Irish music scene. We caught up with the band ahead of the release of their upcoming EP Iarmhaireacht to find out abit more about the band and the EP which is set to drop on the 15th August.

Hi guys you’ve just released your new EP “Iarmhaireacht” can you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit more about Nerves?

Nerves are a band from Mayo and Wicklow in Ireland. We originally started when myself and our drummer Adam were in secondary school, and went through all the growing pains bands do when they start at that age and throughout college. The current form of the band came together at the start of 2024.

I suppose the most succinct way to describe us would be noise-rock but obviously it’s always weird trying to put your sound in a box. 

Usually, I just say we are obnoxiously loud.

The new EP marks your first release as a four-piece. How has the band’s dynamic changed, musically or otherwise, with this new formation?

The dynamic has definitely changed musically in a bunch of interesting ways. As a three piece trying to make the kind of music we make we often found ourselves having to come up with odd and sometimes ineffective ways of making the sound of the band bigger, both live and in the studio. Now I feel like we have so much more depth to explore sonically and in terms of our arrangements because the pressure on any one person isn’t as heavy as it used to be. We just naturally sound massive now. Even when recording this EP, I found myself instinctively thinking that we’ll need to do a bunch of stuff in the mixing process to beef up the sound, or add more overdubs, but when we finished recording all our parts, we realised that adding anything else would be almost useless. It was all there already.

The dynamic in terms of our relationships to each other couldn’t be better; everyone’s temperament matches each other. These guys are my favourite people to spend time with. 

There’s a powerful blend of post-punk, industrial, and drone elements in the new material. What led you to fuse those specific styles? Was there a moment where it all just clicked?

The fusing of all those styles definitely came together over a long period of time, even as a three-piece that’s what we we’re always gravitating towards. A mixture of all the punk and noise rock we had come to love with more blown-out, electronic textures. Everyone has their own style of playing in the band, but they all mesh together in this really coherent way I feel. It definitely started with tunes off our previous EP “Glórach”, “Leigue” kind of sent us on this path but I suppose the lightbulb moments where we realised we were starting to create what we wanted was “Empty” and “Takes a Second”.

Daniel Fox of Gilla Band produced the EP. What was it like working with him, and how did he influence the record’s final sound?

Dan is our Guy, we’ve been working with him for a couple of years now and it’s an absolute dream. Because we’ve had that time together, he’s seen the way that this band has progressed and at this stage has a real understanding of what it is that we want out of the records sonically. We used to come in with reference tracks and notes about specific sounds to kind of guide him towards what we wanted, but now we just show him what we’ve got, and he just knows what to do. We all get along really well in the studio too, our sense of humour matches, and the sessions are really fun but still super focused. As someone in a band we all massively respect, I do have to remind myself that working with him is a privilege. He’s a good friend now, but if you’d said that to 16-year-oldme he’d probably be freaking out. 

You’ve played with acts like The Jesus Lizard and HMLTD – bands known for explosive live shows. How has sharing stages with artists like that shaped your own approach to performance?

I suppose it’s mainly just pushed us to make our live shows more intense. I think we all try not to get too hung up on who it is we are playing with, for the sake of our own sanity, but with these kind of shows generally no one in the audience knows who you are, and you’re playing with a band that they obviously have a massive grá for. You can’t half arse it. First impressions are very important, and getting these shows gives us a chance to make a good impression on people who we want to convert to our corner. We get in people’s faces, we’re very, very loud, and we’re probably the opposite of nonchalant. We want people to come away from these shows talking about our set as much as (if not more than) they’re talking about the band that they paid money to see. 

What’s the most surreal or significant moment you’ve had on stage so far?

Personally, it’s probably the first time we played Paris at Supersonic, when we went on second on a 4-band bill and played to a room of about 350 people with a cue down the road of people trying to get in. At the time, I was in a very odd place in terms of what I wanted out of music, and to be very honest, there was a part of me that wasn’t sure if the band would continue. During that show people were throwing themselves around and absolutely losing it, and I was looking around at all this and the people that were looking down at us from the second level and realised that I can’t stop doing this, it was a very life-changing moment.

You’re handed a blank cheque to curate your dream lineup for a one-night-only show. Who’s playing with you?

My Bloody Valentine 

The Cure

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Mogwai

Wolf Alice 

What’s next for you guys? Any big plans or tours on the horizon?

We’ll be doing more touring in Ireland and the UK towards the end of the year, but can’t say much about the details just yet unfortunately.

Anything else you’d like to add? 

Free Palestine 

You can PRE-ORDER Iarmhaireacht HERE