Gilla Band Return With “Giraffe,” Map Tour Dates Into 2027

Gilla Band are back in the room and making it feel smaller, weirder, and less stable. The Dublin noise-rock band have shared “Giraffe,” their first new song since 2023’s “Sports Day,” and they are pairing it with a limited 7-inch picture disc through Rough Trade.

The song arrives with an animated video by Cuan Roche and Chanthila Phaophanit, and it has the exact wrong-footed physicality you want from this band: clanging guitar pressure, Dara Kiely sounding like he is narrating a private panic attack from inside the machinery, and an outro that turns affection into something almost impossible to trust.

Kiely says the first sections of “Giraffe” mirror a headspace that can feel scattered and lonely, with the outro landing on a hard-to-believe confirmation that love is actually present. The line he points to — “She chased me out the door with a hairbrush demanding that I would wear a suitable jacket” — is funny, painfully specific, and extremely Irish-mammy-coded.

It is also a reminder of how singular Gilla Band still are. Pitchfork notes that the current lineup is Dara Kiely, Alan Duggan Borges, Daniel Fox, and Adam Faulkner, and that the band have been relatively quiet since touring 2022’s Most Normal; their last one-off single was 2023’s “Sports Day.” “Giraffe” does not smooth that absence over. It comes back abrasive and unresolved, which is probably the point.

Gilla Band have also announced a long run of dates: North America this October and November, then Europe and the UK in early 2027. The North American leg includes Brooklyn’s Elsewhere, Chicago’s Bottom Lounge, Los Angeles’ Lodge Room, and Washington, DC’s The Atlantis.