- Girl Band, a quartet from Dublin, Ireland, make uncompromising, relentless, face-melting, skin-scrubbing noise-rock. My personal introduction to the band came a few years back, via the video to their early 7” single 'Lawman'. That song pretty much laid the template for Girl Band bare over its six-and-a-half minutes: stark, repetitive, amelodic guitars paired with metronomic, mechanical drumming and vocalist Dara Kiely's ranted, screamed stream of consciousness singing. In Girl Band, the guitars don't play riffs so much as orchestrated, percussive noise – melody, and indeed pitch, seem to be of secondary importance. 'Lawman' mostly powered along in front of a bone-headed kraut-rock drum beat and variations on a bass riff based around a single slide between two notes. That is, until about two-thirds of the way through the song when things got really chaotic, any notion of sonic restraint thrown out the window, instead being replaced by sheets of pure white noise.

That song was included on The Early Years earlier in 2015, a compilation of the bands early 7” releases. The thing is, now that we have the debut album proper from Girl Band, Lawman seems positively traditional in comparison to some of what's offered up on Holding Hands With Jamie. First single Paul comes closest to the territory that Lawman covered, but instead of holding things back for that big, noisy payoff, Paul gradually builds, explodes, falls back, builds again and pummels with a white hot fury when it reaches its apex. It's almost orchestral in its construction – indeed, Penderecki would be proud of some of the screaming guitars held within, sounding as hellish as the scraped strings in his Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima. Despite this, it's probably the most accessible song contained within this record.

More extreme is the opener Umbongo. The first few seconds lull you into a false sense of security, with a guitar figure that could almost be considered traditional, before a machine-gun like snare drum enters and the cacophony starts to ratchet up. A sedate middle section takes us into creepy, unsettling territory before the noise returns, this time even more chaotic than before. It's certainly a schizophrenic start to a record, and serves as an effective way to set expectations from that point on. Elsewhere, 'In Plastic' is almost tender, presenting Girl Band at their most traditional sounding, with actual melodies and singing, while The Last Riddler is a little over a minute of punk rock noise and vitriol.

There are precedents for Girl Band's music: early Sonic Youth is a clear influence, and My Disco's incorporation of dance music ideas into noise-rock places the two bands in similar territory. There are also obvious markers being taken from kraut-rock and early industrial music. That said, Girl Band have forged a unique, identifiable sound all of their own, surely no mean feat in today's musical climate.

- Cameron Smith.