Profile: Cork band Castle Avenue

Holly Ambrose’s keen interest in music coincided with her entry into secondary school.

“I picked up the guitar in first year and I kind of became obsessed,” she recalls. “I was like, let’s start a band!”

These ambitions had to wait until second year, when she became friends with fellow Bandon native Konrad Szober, having bonded over a shared love of Radiohead and discovering he played the bass.

“When I found out he played we started jamming together,” she outlines. “We were going between singers for a while, but my childhood best friend that I grew up with, Leon Moloney, decided to step in as our singer. We kind of joined our youth group then and they helped us get equipment and stuff.”

They had a different drummer at the time, but when Ambrose saw a video online of Rosscarbery’s Christopher O’Brien playing drums with his then band she texted him asking if he wanted to join her band

“He was not really wanting it at first but then we played a gig to help them out with his current band and he was like, ‘you know what! I’m going to join’.”

Having adopted the name Castle Avenue, a name thought up by Holly’s sister that was an amalgam of the name of the estate they lived in and an adjacent road, the band had solidified late last summer around this line-up.

“Before we got comfortable doing our originals, we only really played Radiohead songs. We used to joke about being a Radiohead cover band,” says Ambrose.

“We didn’t really start writing until just before Chris joined. We wrote one song which I kinda just wrote in my room. Once Chris joined it was crazy to hear a random little idea I had come to life. So, since then I’ve mainly taken the creative process on writing, but we’ve been excited to start writing together. We just needed to understand our sound a bit more.”

In July they released the Bystander EP.

“Each song is in the order of the time we wrote them,” she shares. “It was really like a timeline kind of EP of us finding our sound. But I think it’s kind of nice in a way.”

Bystander charts the evolution of Castle Avenue in less than a year. The opening two tracks, The Bat and Get a Word In, capture their youthful enthusiasm, whereas the third track, Can You See Me? sees them reveal a more measured and expansive side. Indeed, it’s this very track that Ambrose feels offers a more likely path to where their forthcoming songs will lead.

Although they feel they have outgrown the energy of The Bat, Ambrose still feels a strong connection to it.

“We always say that The Bat would be our Creep because Radiohead really hate Creep now and The Bat was what made our friends start listening to us. Because they really like that song, and we don’t like it as much as them.

“Although we recorded it way after we formed, I still feel kind of young listening back to it. Because I didn’t know anything I was doing when I was writing the song. I wanted the EP to be a timeline of where we started and where we got now,” she reflects.

The final piece of the Castle Avenue jigsaw fell into place only in the past month or so when they became a five-piece with the addition of Eva McCarthy on rhythm guitar.

“She was friends with our bassist growing up,” Ambrose reveals. “So, we are all very close friends, basically.”

• Castle Avenue play Clarity Festival at the Kino on November 15, alongside Gorilla Gorilla, Speaker, Silver, White Noise and Stone Mad.