Bricknasty bring The Nasty Sessions to Cork Opera House as part of jazz celebrations

Grit, grime, guts and a profound experimental streak have defined Dublin outfit Bricknasty from the beginning. Emerging from Ballymun as a solo project with a ready-made sense of sonic adventure, things quickly evolved into a live band with a musical literacy that places them between jazz, soul, punk, folk, and hip-hop - readily recognisable as a product of its geographical home, while wearing an array of musical influences and hard-reflected-upon life experiences on its sleeve.

It’s earned the band a core following in their native city and the intrigue of gig-goers further afield - including Dublin venue The Sugar Club giving them a regular residency that’s seen them perform and collaborate live with a wide and deep pool of Irish genre talents, evolving into The Nasty Sessions, a series of spot gigs and collaborations that sees them bring that curatorial sense to events around the country.

“This configuration came together from road-testing the session idea for so long,” says bassist Dara Abdurahman, as we wait for other band members to join us remotely. 

We were playing in the Sugar Club, like, monthly in 2023, and that has spawned the Nasty Sessions thing, that we’ve kept going - to do it in Cork, for the Jazz, it’s very exciting, and at the Cork Opera House as well? It’s going to be a sweet one.

Vocalist and guitarist Fatboy, usually one to be seen publicly clad in a balaclava, joins the call. “They’re fun to play,” he says of the recurring Nasty Sessions engagements. “We just love playing, we want to play as much as we can, and Cork is obviously the best city in Ireland, they say, y’know, so it’s a handy one”, he smiles.

Optimism and levity are ideas that one may not necessarily associate with the band’s early output. Debut album ‘Ina Crueler’ became a cult classic in the eyes of hardened listeners almost immediately, earning critical acclaim for its observations on growing up and maturing in Ballymun, but a series of misfortunes, and the need to lean into the community they were building, shaped an altogether different direction for the band after said success.

New mixtape ‘XONGZ’, or (‘XONGZ ’, if one were to give it its full title), is one product of a difficult period for Fatboy and the band, but speaks to a more human approach to collectively surmounting adversity, from the former getting focused on sobriety and good health while caring for his mother, as they both battled the spectre of homelessness, to the latter stepping in to carry songwriting and live musical direction while he was recovering.

It started when we were out on tour, in November of last year, started compiling new ideas, just trying to learn how to ‘properly’ make music again after Ina Crueler, which [Fatboy] can attest to having struggled with.

“We took them to Hellfire [Studios, Dublin] for a few days, and got the bare bones of what we were going to be working with for this new project, and then just tried to whittle it down to the best stuff,” says Abdurahman. “And, yeah, that’s just the process, how it came about as a band. We’re all just trying to learn how to do it together now, and how to do it in a healthy way.”

“Just gonna say, like... there is a lot of figuring out that’s still going on in all of us, I think, like, musically, personally and musically as a band,” muses saxophonist and keyboardist Louis Younge, “...and I think that was a lot of what this mixtape has been for us. I wasn’t in the band when ‘Ina Crueler’ started being made, like that was years and years of work, it was super-conceptual, and if something didn’t tick all the fucking boxes, it went in the bin immediately.

Says Fatboy: “Then when we got towards the end of it, we were slaving away on it, and more work went into, say, the arrangement and the makeup of the songwriting, so just trying to keep it straight down the line songwriting, challenging ourselves to just keep it really, really simple, y’know what I mean? If there’s one part that feels good to play, that’s your song.”

Mixtape standout ‘Mouthy’ features voicenotes from the Nasty Sessions’ original run at the Sugar Club - a very real expression of solidarity and community from the band’s peers and contemporaries in Dublin, as they began as fundraisers for Fatboy and family as they faced their time of need.

That same sense of solidarity still very much reflects the band’s modus operandi as a unit at a time of social and economic division and exploitation, even while their musical focus shifts from the inherent to the external.

“They came out and stopped us going homeless at a time when my mother was dying sick. Solidarity, we still have to work out, because [the far-right] are operating in working-class communities, and I think we have a long way to go in trying to have the working class have anything to do, really, with the artists or the political class, but I do think that musicians and the community, in this particular instance, turned out to stop a member of the working class of Dublin from going homeless.

“But I’d like to see more cross-pollination in terms of people who are actually, like, in O’Devaney Gardens, people who are actually on Frederick Street, people who are getting f**king thumped around by Public Order Unit everyday, 14-year-olds who are getting bet half to death by plain-clothes. I’d like to see more of them have more to do with the artists’ community, which, right now there isn’t a lot of.

“There’s obviously bad-faith actors who, don the mantle of ‘far right’ and stuff like that, but them bad-faith actors, they’re actually going into like, places like Coolock and Finglas, to lads who have no jobs, or 14-year-olds who are little nobody’s-childs, wearing their school uniform on Saturdays and Sundays, whispering in their ears, and making an effort to outreach to them. 

So, like, until we make that effort, I’ll always use my platform and my voice to make sure that everyone’s going to hear it.

They’ll have a ready-made crowd to hear what they have to say on Sunday night, and while Dublin is naturally at the centre of their creative and perceptive considerations, Fatboy’s enthusiasm for what’s been boiling away here is evident.

Cork’s the spot, I’d say it’s the best place in the country for proper music, too, in my opinion. Ye have the School of Music there, Sam Healy is only 17, but he could play the phone book on any instrument.

“Ye just seem to breed, like, savant musicians, they just seem to f**kin’ fall out of Cork left, right and centre. That’s why I love going down, it’s very humbling.”

Bricknasty anchor The Nasty Sessions at Cork Opera House on Sunday, October 27, with special guests Khakikid, Curtisy, Shiv and F3miii. Doors 11pm, tickets from corkoperahouse.ie or venue box office.

New mixtape ‘XONGZ ’ is available for streaming across all digital music services now.