Leeside alt-rockers Mirrors: Playing to the Faithful at The Pavilion in Cork tonight

If there’s one unifying, and nearly reassuring trait among the ‘emergent’ musicians of the post-pandemic age in Cork city, it’s that for all the ways in which the game has changed and musicians have had to accordingly react, an awareness is present to varying degrees that the city in which they coalesce and make their music is an outlier, both physically and, in many ways, spiritually. It’s a theme your writer has carped on about often in recent years — unburdened of commercial expectations, or personal ambitions beyond creative process and the struggles beyond, people by and large follow their respective muses.

Such is the case with Cork youngsters Mirrors, an alternative rock five-piece who, like their generational peers, have emerged from the post-pandemic picture tasked with finding their own way through music’s various rites of passage. On debut extended-player Envious of the Faithful, that path has taken them through their own frames of reference to a Hibernocentric line of melancholic alternative rock, marrying aspects of shoegaze, early Dublin post-punk, and broadly influential guitar pop to considerations of Irishness in the modern time, from rejections of wider Western hegemonies, to questions of generational and institutional trauma.

“It’s just people coming up to you in the pub, and it’s a Cork thing, people just being like, ‘oh, I heard your EP, and it’s actually good’, and you’re like, ‘cheers, thanks’, after all the hours slaving away,” remarks guitarist Fionnán Sheehan on the early reception the extended-player has received, over a lunchtime cuppa with other members of the band at a busy Léa’s Café, a gem hidden in the basement of UCC’s Glucksman art gallery.

“It’s somewhat distinct in terms of sound, especially compared to what we’ve done in the past, but we have a genuine sound, and there’s genuine cohesion between the tracks on the record, which I’m super-proud of,” remarks drummer Daithí Nolan.

Vocalist/guitarist Jodie Lyne expands: “It’s really cohesive in the sense of ideas and concepts, compared to the music that we’ve grown from, and it’s been interesting for ourselves to see that growth.”

“It’s the first stuff we’ve put out that feels like, ‘we’re really doing something here’, and with the recent gig, it felt like the real deal — it feels surreal, for me anyway, just being up on stage,” says guitarist/vocalist Charlie Cullinane of the band’s Cyprus Avenue launch gig on January 5 last — bucking received local wisdom that the immediate post-Christmas weeks are something of a fallow period for gigs and attendances.

The aforementioned conceptual considerations are the backbone of Envious of the Faithful, and while the band have plunged their personal depths and emerged with a wide sonic palate, Lyne in particular is proud of having explored lyrics for the record in English and Irish, and pulling together reflections and storytelling on guilt and grievance. Leadoff single ‘Echoes’ is a meditation on the nature of addiction, escape, and questions of shame surrounding the issue — and an invitation to examine one’s own awareness and relationship to wider societal attitudes to those affected.

“I was at the Fastnet film festival in Youghal, and my friend Alex Kiely had a film called Psychosis, about a relationship between a male and female; the male was struggling and the female was helping him through it. The whole time watching it, I was feeling so much empathy toward the female, constantly watching him relapse, and living with someone struggling with addiction.

“The more I thought about it… the more I felt bad for having more empathy for the female, because every waking moment for someone struggling with addiction is just that, a struggle. We only seem to turn around and… we never seem to look at the external factors that cause addiction, we almost seem to criminalise the person with an addiction [as a moral failing, rather than a health issue], we only ever seem to praise them when they’re sober.

“When I was writing the verses, I was struggling to pick words, and the idea presented itself of a safe space, the ‘echoes’, where someone might go to struggle, away from friends and family, and make the decision to do so away from the judgement of other people. How we conceptualise it, I’ve found, is always very interesting because of how we perceive [people struggling with addiction] negatively, we never look at those external factors.”

Appearing twice on the record, both in full-band form and a bonus acoustic rendition at the end, ‘Na Soilse’ is a trí-Gaeilge meditation on envy and exclusion by way of a narrative device familiar across an array of world cultures.

It’s about the moon being jealous of the sun — how the sun sees everyone during the day, while the moon sees all the negatives in everyone by night

“That one probably took the longest to put together, with the guitars being something like we hadn’t done before. It’s about the moon being jealous of the sun — how the sun sees everyone during the day, while the moon sees all the negatives in everyone by night. The tracks are all different when you dive into them, but they all come up… they’re all related in some sense, there’s some connection between them all.”

Touching on the writing process of the songs brings up another major undercurrent of the band’s existence — their stated debt of gratitude to Irish and diaspora music, culture, and the idea of a new, pluralist Irish identity emerging from the last century of tumult and post-colonial trauma.

It’s especially poignant to hear young people talk about connection amid the distance of emigration and its effect on the daily routine of being in a band, as two of the band’s members currently live and work abroad amid the current housing crisis. To listen to the band speaking of their relation to Irish artists they admire, is to hear of the sending and returning of ideas and understandings around music and Irish identity.

“The bones of ‘Na Soilse’ came from Charlie and myself messing around with guitar,” says Nolan. “We had that opening riff, and a lot of it was just, ‘oh, this doesn’t sound very rock, it had a bit more of a sort of a jig or reel feel, and from there that really lent itself to Jodie, who has always been interested in expressing the fact that we’re Irish and we’re very proud of being Irish.

“Our bass player, Cal, does too, he’s studying in the Netherlands, in Groningen. I think it’s just so lovely to have a song on this, not only in Irish and conveying Irish, but sounds Irish, without sounding like it’s mimicking, just sounds like a natural extension of rock and our Celtic heritage.”

The idea of a coherent whole that draws from that wide array of historic Irish influences, and the socioeconomic undercurrents that continue to inform the country’s culture, was tied together by Cobh producer Cian Synnott, working with the band out of The Clinic studio in Dublin in the summer of last year to sift the band’s songs into shape.

“We came into that summer with six songs to record and, straight away, he could grasp what we were trying to do, the songs that were worth trying to make this a real cohesive record from the ones that worked, as well as how we could shape those songs,” says Nolan of the process.

“I just remember the first rehearsal we had with him, because he sat in on rehearsals for our recording,” adds Cullinane. “We’d play a song through, and spend 10, 15 minutes just on one section with the drums. And it was just like, ‘this person really knows what they’re doing, and really cares about genuinely helping us craft the song’, but it was through our own channel of, ‘this is the tools I can give you, but I’m not going to do it for ye’, which is really important because it’s our own, as much as he has helped shape our own writing and our understanding of production and the post-production side of stuff.

“It felt like we were all working towards a common goal. Like, it didn’t feel like we’d given someone money and he was there because he was getting paid — it felt like there was definitely a lot of synergy between us and Cian, it didn’t really feel like a business transaction, y’know what I mean? It was like, ‘this is the idea we have, and we’re going to knock our heads together and make this work’.”

Mirrors’ debut EP, Envious of the Faithful, is out now.   Picture: Mark O’Sullivan

Mirrors play The Pavilion tonight for promoters BLARE’s UCC Refreshers Week party, alongside Tralee rockers Aftershock and the Summerhill DJ collective. Kickoff 10pm, tickets €12 from here.