Julie Dawson has been thinking a lot about home: the rolling vistas and slow tranquility of her native Galway versus the hustle of London, where she and the rest of NewDad – guitarist Sean O’Dowd and drummer Fiachra Parslow – have built their career since moving to the capital four years ago. When the band first relocated after lockdown, following the industry’s breadcrumb trail after a host of mid-COVID radio play and online excitement sent their star rising, the change felt necessary. These days, she’s not so sure.
“I think it was important for us to come here and get those new experiences, but even now I look back and think, maybe we should have stayed and tried to create more of a thriving scene in Galway instead of jumping ship,” the vocalist considers. “You always hear about these amazing artists that come from towns in England that I’ve never even heard of, all these tiny places, and that does breed creativity. In Galway, we have the sea and the town but there’s not very much to do, so you tend to start looking to yourself for things to keep you busy. It’s always in these places where creativity thrives rather than in a city where you’re racing around.”
In the years since that 2020 breakthrough, NewDad have been racing around more than most. They released two early EPs – 2021’s ‘Waves’ and the following year’s ‘Banshee’ – that underlined the group’s knack for heady melodies to fully submerge yourself within; an intoxicating mix of dream-pop and shoegaze. 2024’s debut LP ‘Madra’ was hailed by NME as “confident and propulsive”, with its authors dubbed “Ireland’s next great guitar band”.
Now, just 18 months on, they’re returning with its follow-up ‘Altar’. While many of those traits remain, buoyed by an even greater dynamic range from the poppier strut of ‘Heavyweight’ to the full-on scream of ‘Roobosh’, Dawson’s preoccupations are very much those of a band entering their next phase and assessing what they’ve left behind as much as what they’ve gained.
“In Galway, we have the sea and the town but there’s not very much to do – It’s always in these places where creativity thrives”
The ‘Altar’ in question is Galway itself. “It’s just a really welcoming place,” Dawson smiles. “It’s very gloomy but I really love its gloominess at the same time. It’s something like the rainiest city in Europe. It’s really wet and wild and there’s something about it that feels very calming to me even though it can be quite fierce.” She notes that the particular landscape of their home almost certainly helped shape NewDad’s expansive musicality: “There’s something about how vast and empty Galway is that you want to fill the space, that’s where that big, lush, loud sound came from.”
While ‘Altar’ is an album that rings with homesickness, Dawson is realistic about both the area’s beauty and its struggle. Like much of Ireland, it’s also a place going through a period of visible economic strain where, she says, “it’s incredibly hard to live in Ireland and make music in Ireland and do anything in Ireland.” ‘Pretty’ personifies Galway with the romantic longing of a love interest, yet by ‘Mr Cold Embrace’, the relationship has turned darker and harder to maintain.
“My mum works with a lot of students and my sister works in the university, and more than half of the people there are commuting from three hours away because they can’t even afford to live in Galway,” she says. “All these amazing places are shutting down and there’s a serious lack of venues. I look at Ireland and I love it, and when I compare it to London I’m like, ‘God, it’s heaven’. But it’s not without its faults. Not everyone’s hopping around drinking Guinness.”
One of a thriving cohort of artists, from Fontaines D.C. to Kneecap and CMAT, putting a musical focus on Ireland in recent years, Dawson is nonetheless positive about the effects of this attention. “If you have the drive within yourself, you can kind of do it from anywhere [now]. You don’t have to spend all your money on a flat in London to pursue music, which is an entirely unachievable thing for a lot of people,” she suggests.
With fellow NME Cover stars English Teacher becoming the first non-London winners of the Mercury Prize in a decade, and this year’s awards moving to Newcastle alongside a BRIT Awards relocation to Manchester, it feels like there’s a sea change occurring. “I don’t think I need to be here anymore,” Dawson says. “Now we know what we’re doing, so we know we can go home and we don’t have to be tied into the slog of the big city, because that’s not always conducive to trying to create things. It’s not always the best place to be.”
This push and pull of ambition also manifests through Dawson’s interactions with the knottier, more insidious sides of the industry itself. On the melancholic sweetness of ‘Everything I Wanted’ she addresses this duality: “’Cause what I’m breathing in is toxic / I tell myself, it’s everything I wanted”. Having quickly found themselves under a spotlight back in 2020 with little preparation or experience, the past five years have been a steep learning curve for the singer in standing her ground and learning to say ‘no’.
“I’ve had moments where I was being told how I should be looking on stage or, because I didn’t fit into whoever’s idea of what a front person in a rock band should be, that I was doing something wrong. But I look at all my favourite artists and generally they’re all absolute freaks. They’re really unhinged on stage or really nervous and they’re just being themselves, which is all you can be,” she says. “There were a few moments where I had to be like: ‘Do not ever tell me how to dress. Do not tell me how I should feel about something. I’m gonna figure this all out in my own time’. You can’t just give into what people expect of you or you’ll lose yourself.
“God bless any kids that blow up on TikTok and then get thrust into the music industry because [this industry] is terrifying,” Dawson continues. “We live in this data-driven, viral world, but I firmly believe it’s not conducive to a successful career. So much of the time, [viral TikTok stars] are young people in their bedrooms who’ve never played a live show, but how can you possibly do a job like this when you’ve had no experience? You need time to get good at being on stage and knowing who you are and how you want to present yourself.”
“Now we know what we’re doing, so we know we can go home and we don’t have to be tied into the slog of the big city”
These days, however, NewDad have truly drilled down into the bones of who they are and what they stand for. For their upcoming tour, Parslow will not be joining them, instead opting to take a necessary break after the band’s hectic recent years. For Dawson, prioritising her bandmates’ wellbeing and keeping NewDad solid as a unit – no matter what hurdles the outside world may throw at them – is the most important thing.
“He’ll be back and I’m looking forward to that because we’ve had two shows now without him and it’s fucking bizarre,” she chuckles. “But the road is hard. It’s hard being away from home and going through those intense time changes and always being on the move. If you feel like you need a break, you need to do that otherwise it’ll just end in tears.” Again, all talk returns to home and the trio’s Galway-shaped north star. They might have left it for now, but ‘Altar’ is a multifaceted tribute to the place that raised them in all its complicated beauty.
NewDad’s new album ‘Altar’ is out now via Fair Youth