An interview with Cork trad noise/post rock band Pebbledash
Damien Joyce (aka The Human Recommendation) chats with Fionnbharr Hickey and Cormac Donovan O’Neill from Cork band Pebbledash ahead of their upcoming Ireland Music Week appearance.
Cork band Pebbledash weave together this wonderful blend of Irish trad infused noise/post rock. Earlier this year, back in May, I saw Pebbledash performing live when they were closing out the day at Rough Trade Records as part of the Dot To Dot festival in Bristol. Despite traveling all the way from Southampton where they played an earlier gig, they showed no sign of weariness on stage and were kind enough to speak with me briefly after their enthralling set.
I caught up with band members Fionnbharr Hickey and Cormac Donovan O’Neill from Pebbledash ahead of their upcoming Ireland Music Week appearance. We began by speaking about different venues in Dublin city that they enjoy playing in, including The Workman's and Anseo.
Cormac: When you’re in Anseo, it’s like you’re in somebody’s living room; it’s great! I just love the kind of the red carpet; that’s very David Lynch.
Damien: It’s funny you mentioned about David Lynch, because you’d be amazed about how many times, he comes up in my interviews with musicians. He had an insistence on letting a film or movie speak for itself. Do you feel the same thing about your music? At this stage of your careers, do you enjoy talking about individual EPs and tracks, or would you prefer to let the music speak for itself?
Fionnbharr: I’ll probably just end the interview now! (Laughter ensued before he continued) I do find it difficult because writing music, I guess it’s such a personal thing, sometimes it’s you’re writing and you know what you’re writing about, but it’s hard to say it in any other way than how it’s in the song. I still think it’s worthwhile trying to figure out a way to explain that to other people as well. But at the same time, everyone’s going to have their own interpretation of it. I think rather than, not liking doing it, I think I just actually find it kind of difficult sometimes to explain it more coherently, I guess, because you can kind of get lost in the sauce of it.
Damien: Well, I suppose it depends on the context with interviews? Whether you have a bit more time to explain yourself or understand what people are looking for when putting a mic in front of you and trying to explain something, that’s a bit more complicated in a quick sound bite. I guess for songwriting spending a bit of time outside yourself is having a kind of release?
Fionnbharr: Absolutely, I think it’s great when whoever’s interviewing, that they’re familiar with the songs and they can have their own opinions on things. I think that’s kind of what makes it worthwhile then rather than you just telling people; this is exactly what this line is about.
Damien: Yes, I’ve said it to you before, but I think the most interesting bands are the ones that have blended genres mix that you can’t fit into a box. Sometimes they are more difficult to get into initially, but I find they’re the ones that stay with me the longest. There’s something about that music that just sort of comes back after a couple of days, and especially after seeing you live, I was still processing that afterwards. I have such admiration for yourselves and other musicians for the amount of effort you put into a gig and all the travel because I just spent the last couple of days up in Dublin at gigs and I’m wrecked. I know I’m a lot older, but I wasn’t even playing! I was just watching, and I’m exhausted!
Fionnbharr: It does take it out of you, right? It’s weird because going on tour or the buildup to touring, there’s so much organising and all that kind of stuff going on. You’re not dreading it, but I think there’s just a lot of work, then you get into it, and it’s like, oh, this is the best thing ever! By the time you have to go home, it’s like you’re kind of relieved for a little bit of rest, but I find we’re almost always at our saddest at going home. It’s like, we’re happy… oh, we completed these from the case or whatever, then you kind of forget about being wrecked, but then you do sleep for the next three or four days.
Damien: I guess there’s a bit of anticipation about fulfilling the dates and then performing at your best. Are you able to enjoy it in the aftermath of a gig?
Fionnbharr: There’s usually a little bit of depression after a lot of gigs because you’re thinking, I just want to be doing that again.
Cormac: Yes, definitely, I think I could feel just like that, I think because there’s so much intensely structured time when you’re on tour. Whether it’s even if you’re not playing a gig that day, if you know you have to be in another city by a certain time, if you only need to check-in somewhere, the whole thing is just so regimented. When you’re back home then and you’re just sort of going about your normal life, even if you’re still very busy in your day to day with work and whatnot, it feels so much less, almost simplified your time. It just it suits me very well, I think, my disposition.
Fionnbharr: I think people who are kind of creatively inclined, we need that little bit extra to find that purpose and satisfaction. Obviously, there’s people that can do a job during the week, come home and do whatever, be happy with that and that’s excellent as well. They’re probably better off in many ways, but I think we can have that catch, where we need to be doing something extra as well as earning a keep at the moment. I think that in itself can be quite labour intensive and tiring when you’re trying to live two lives a little bit, both physically and probably mentally.
Damien: Oh, I’d imagine there’s a toll on the nervous system between the adrenaline of playing the gigs no matter how comfortable you are as musicians, in that live environment and just processing everything else. That’s interesting what you said, is music whether sounds, lyrics or melodies always running through you both as musicians?
Fionnbharr: Yes, I mean, if I’m not writing something, I’m always thinking about writing. I think for the last while, things have been kind of stressful now. So, it’s harder for specific melodies to be coming through, but I think my brain is constantly on …. thinking about what to do next, if it’s not focused on a certain thing. We finished up a lot of recording stuff there lately enough. So, I think that’s fresh in our brains, and now I can just feel new stuff for whatever is after that, two projects down the road I guess beginning to wear a tad a little bit. I think for me, it’s constantly kind of taking over.
Cormac: Absolutely. I think no matter what we’re doing and even if it’s, as you said, very soon after we’ve finished a period of recording or you have one project in the bag, I think I find it hard to not be thinking about other ideas. In a way then, it can be a bad thing because after you finish a recording session, sometimes I think that part of your brain is a bit like, well, you could have done this. But I think it’s nice in another way because I’m always very excited about the next thing even if we’re just finished the previous thing. I’m just like, bring on the next.
Fionnbharr: I think it’s so easy to access music now, it’s nearly overwhelming when you hear some artists that you’d never heard before and you’re like, oh, wow… that’s so good, that’s another huge influence on me. There’s just so much out there; it’s trying to filter them, but there’s so much that we could do as well. So, I think it come it can become overwhelming very easily, that’s the thing you have to really focus in on your own stuff or how you want to do things.
Damien: You’ve had two EPs out in 2025, Four Portraits of the Same Ugly House and To Cast the Sea in Concrete, both very different, both produced by different people. But I was curious about Cathal MacGabhann’s influence as a producer and working with him, if he was hands on or did he just let you guys rip? What kind of relationship do you have with him?
Cormac: I think as a producer, what was great about Cathal was that he before we went in and recorded To Cast The Sea In Concrete with him, he met up with us and had an explicit discussion about, I suppose how we saw ourselves in relation to a producer, recording engineer figure, and to what extent we wanted him to be very hands on or very hands off. I think that is something that’s of a tremendous benefit to just having an idea of a dynamic before you go in, so there’s no difficulties. I think working with Cathal was a pleasure because of that.
Obviously, with his music from The Altered Hours, you can tell that he comes from a lot of the same musical influences that we would come from. It was good that he had that kind of lexicon. But in general, I think we had a good idea of a lot of those songs when we went into the studio, and they were quite well worked out just because a lot of them, especially Tiles & Moss and others that have been around for quite a long time.
But I think what I loved about working with him was that he wasn’t afraid to offer his opinion when he had a really good idea or even just what you really want from a recording engineer. I think he has a good capacity to know maybe if you could give something a bit more to a take. Not necessarily like a different idea, but I always found he was very much able to catch if a take that maybe we were thinking, oh, that was fine, wasn’t necessarily all we could give to that song. I thought he was always good at saying, do one more just in case there’s another aspect of that that you could get. He had just a lot of very positive kind of influence on that EP just in the environment that he produced working with him and just the ease of communication, made it easy to realise what we wanted from that.
Damien: I think that it comes across in the music though in the EP as well, with that environment. Because when I listen to it, I get totally absorbed, whether it’s Tiles & Moss, which just makes me so happy or, O The Wind which is sort of like chewing gum for the brain. It just has a bit of a sensory overload for me, in a good way. There are so many different sounds and textures along with Asha’s haunting vocals. I was talking to an Irish trad player, Jane Pomplas, she’s branching out a bit more out of her comfort zone playing in different genres. I was asking her about her experience playing trad. She explained this feeling of playing in a group of people where you get to a point where individual players and instruments all blend into everything else. Is that the same for you guys? Is that the kind of same feeling you’re chasing?
Fionnbharr: Yes, we did a set up at Altogether Now there lately and, from the very get go we’re starting off the set at the moment with a sample of an uilleann pipe tune, and then we kind of kick into one of our newer songs. But it’s a fairly sudden kind of crash into things and just that immediate swell, and you get that punch in the chest kind of a feeling. I think that it’s a big focus of our thing. I know everyone calls it this wall of sound, but I don’t think it’s quite that because we don’t have layers upon layers of buzz, guitars. You can still kind of pick everything out, but at the same time, it’s like this marriage of sounds. It’s weird, I think all of us individually have really different styles. Lucas can be quite funky sounding on the bass, even the tone, not necessarily the playing, but that you wouldn’t listen to us and pick out, oh, that’s kind of a funky tone on the bass.
I think that came a lot from the first EP. I had this huge pedalboard with loads of different things. By the time we got around to doing the second EP, I was thinking I actually don’t need all these things anymore. I just need three petals or four petals? And then because Cormac was doing this whole synthy stuff with all the textures as well. We’ve learned how to blend things together a lot, and I think that really came through in the second EP more than maybe even the first.
Cormac: I agree, you’re dead right in saying as well that the second EP is a lot less of that wall of sound kind of thing that people maybe would have associated with us than the first EP was. Even maybe some of the heavier parts of Slowly Slowly or Alone and Forsaken. They feel very far removed from both what we’re doing now and even what we were doing for most of To Cast A Sea In Concrete.
There’s shoegaze elements in our music, but I think there’s a lot of bands that, we appreciate as well, bands such as Big Thief or Yo la Tengo where there’s elements of massive slabs of distortion, but that the arrangement is such that all the parts are very much discernible on their own thing. I think we’ve moved much more in that direction.
Again, even from the last EP with this most recent batch recordings we’ve done where I think there’s a lot of songs that are just very direct, pointillist kind of guitar tones where you know exactly what’s going on and I know it’s just in service of the songwriting, I suppose?
Fionnbharr: I think it’s interesting as well you talked about the trad stuff because I would have come up with an Irish traditional background stuff going on. But I always found if I was at a seisiún and there were 20 or 30 people there playing it’s almost, too much. Whereas a seisiún with five or six people, they’re all decent players and you can tell that they know each other then it brings out this richness that becomes this unified sound. I think that’s more what we’re looking for.
I know shoegaze has become like this well, for me a dirty word that, people kind of slap on everything now, and it dilutes things to show everyone has this preconceived idea of what it is. It’s either Loveless or it’s not good, for me anyway. There is that kind of big monolithic sound, but I think for us, it’s like if you took away one of those instruments, then it’s kind of gone. So, it’s nothing’s kind of carrying it, it’s like the unity of it all.
Damien: You mentioned Altogether Festival and Cormac mentioned one of the smaller venues in Dublin. I love those soft, loud dynamics, especially with female vocals and the guitar. Do you think you have your live sound nailed down with Asha’s vocals? Or now does it depend on the venue and the sound engineer? Or is it night by night you take it?
Fionnbharr: It's kind of night by night. I mean, most of us have in-ear monitors, so that’s made it a lot easier. Before it was very hard difficult for Asha to hear herself on stage even. But I guess for front of house sound, it’s really dependent. Some people know how to do that really well and are used to dealing with a lot of those louder bands. But I think that, we still struggle maybe in smaller venues just because of the size of the room and the reverberations; it can be really hard to get our vocals over that.
But I think the midsize, I mean we were supporting Baby Shambles there last weekend in Vicar Street, and it was our first time playing at the venue, which was really cool. Even though we were opening, it felt like the room suited the sound. It just had that space for things to kind of occupy where they needed to be, which I think is great.
Hopefully, we get to play more venues like that because I think it really allows us to show off everything rather than sometimes you can feel like the sound is cramped in a space. And, like, it’s funny because, like, I really love playing in smaller venues and stuff because people are right there in front of you. But I think just in terms of serving the sound, bigger venues kind of make it better. I went to see Slowdive in the National Stadium a while ago, and I remember thinking that even though it’s a really big room, it felt a little bit small for their sound. Spaces are 100% something that we consider when we’re picking sets and things as well.
Damien: I love the way Asha and you work together vocally with all the instrumentation around you. Will there be more harmonies on the newer stuff as well? Because it’s lovely hearing the two voices with all that build-up of sound.
Fionnbharr: I think there is. Cormac, Is there?
Cormac: There is actually a lot of, I think almost every song! Okay. But there’s a lot of really great two-part harmonies. Actually, one thing I like on some of the new recordings is in addition to the harmonies that we’d usually have had in our music before there’s a lot more sort of back and forth individually on a good few songs between Asha and Fionnbharr. So, she’d sing a verse and then he’d sing a verse or vice versa.
I think it’s obviously, the harmonies are one way in which the vocals can be really well executed, but I also think it’s great that you have kind of those two voices and what you can infer relation to the lyrics with those two voices trading places, in within one song rather than necessarily having, this is a song that’s sung by Fionnbharr, this is a song that’s sung by Asha. I think it’s very it’s just interesting to the ear.
Damien: Lovely. I can’t wait for it. Without putting you on the spot, is there some timeline roughly when that new music will be appearing?
Fionnbharr: Not really, we’re still figuring that out
Damien: You’re working on it; it’s coming. That’s good enough for me.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity, but you can listen to the whole interview over on Mixcloud here:
Catch Pebbledash at Ireland Music Week, at The Grand Social on Oct 2nd
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