The second pressing of Search Results debut album coincided neatly with a great review in Dublin's GOO magazine. Written by Aaron Kavanagh, editor-in-chief of Post-Burnout, a culture website he founded in September 2022, it was originally published in Dublin's GOO magazine. Aaron kindly gave us full permission to reprint the article here.
The experimental and freeform music made by the Dublin trio Search Results is hard to define, although that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
With influences like The Velvet Underground and Parquet Courts, and comparisons made to Mark E. Smith, Camper Van Beethoven, and The Minutemen, they are often associated with the increasingly-nebulous postpunk label.
“I feel like we’re definitely friendly with a lot of the people in those bands, and, because of that, I feel like we get lumped into that genre,” says the band’s bassist, Adam Hoban. “But I wouldn’t, personally, label it as postpunk. I couldn’t even tell ya what postpunk is, because it seems to be so broad at this stage, now. When people ask me what type of music do we play in the band, I never really know what to say. I usually end up saying postpunk, but what does that even mean anymore?”
The band formed in 2019 when the members were studying at BIMM. There were various arrangements to the line-up, and, at one point, the band existed as a fourpiece, but the three consistent members of Adam, guitarist Fionn Brennan, and drummer Jack Condon, found a kinship in their mutual disdain and rejection of the music which their college was training them in.
“BIMM kind of gears you up to be a pop musician, more than anything,” says Adam. “So, they’re trying to form you into a commercial artist or an offshoot of that, like a session musician. Something marketable. Which was kind of everything we didn’t want to be.”
“I don’t think we knew that before joining it, though!” laughs Fionn. “It took us going there to go, ‘actually, I don’t really like that,’ but we have this.” Adam concludes, “The only thing we got out of it, really, was the band, which was probably the best possible outcome that we could have gotten out of it.”
Despite writing their songs separately, Adam and Fionn both concede that the actual result of Search Results' music is completely idiosyncratic to the three playing together. In 2021, the band released their first EP, Mirrors, which was a compilation of all the songs they had written at that time. Their follow-up EP, No Punchline Arousal, came in 2022, and in September just gone, they dropped their debut album, Information Blip.
Quickly recorded in a studio during a freezing cold January with producer Darragh Hansard of Thee U.F.O, the album features an appropriately foggy and rainy character in its production. While the album showcases a notable leap in production quality from their previous EPs, the band feel that it was a lot rawer, production-wise.
With their debut album finally out, we asked them how they felt. “It’s just nice not to be waiting around with the same songs anymore, I think,” says Fionn. “I think everyone should be doing that, too. The EPs were good for us too, and we weren’t ready for an album at that stage, but if we’re ever at a point where we’re like, ‘Why aren’t we releasing this?’, it’s something close to wasting time.
“Because it’s just important to feel like you’re in that blank slate again. The most exciting part right now is that we don’t know what we’re doing next. We imagine there’ll be an album next year, but we don’t know what it’s going to look or sound like, and that’s nice, because we have that time to do that, and the only reason we can do that is because we got that last album done with.”
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