FEATURE: Spotlight: Chalk — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Chalk

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A band that are going to…

be making big waves this year, Chalk are appearing on many lists of ‘ones to watch 2025’. They are being tipped by so many different sites. I am quite new to their work but I can understand what all the fuss is about. Their upcoming E.P., Conditions III, is out on 1st February. The trio have a few great gigs coming up. They are playing the iconic King Tut's Wah Wah Hut on 27th February. I am going to get to some interviews with them. First, here is some biography about the brilliant Chalk:

“Chalk is the three-piece project of Irish musicians and now Academy Award winning filmmakers Ross Cullen Benedict Goddard and Luke Niblock. The band was formed in 2019 after they met whilst studying film and realised they shared the same musical vision and ambitions. The trio sprung out of the gates live, supporting London's PVA in Dublin for their first ever show, before selling out their debut hometown headline in Belfast and embarking on a UK/IRE tour starting on the 6th May. The tour included two full capacity shows as part of the First Fifty at Brighton's 'The Great Escape' Festival.

With the release of their debut EP 'Conditions', the band interweave their industrial noise/techno hybrid soundscape and the monochromatic gothic visual landscape they have created for themselves in an evocative and seamless manner.

The anthemic titular track 'Conditions' represents Chalk's exploration of everything life brings to us as human beings, both in our dreams and in our relationships, the deflating and the uplifting, the past and the future. It's about the seemingly eternal struggle to find out who we really are as people, wrestling to discover what our purpose is... and where we belong in this world.

"The love of the dance scene meets the love of raw darkly atmospheric noise" - Steve Lamacq, BBC 6 Music

"A band full of TNT... a sucker punch of a blow to the chest. Such an exciting starting point" - Jack Saunders, BBC Radio 1

"An utterly captivating sonic environment. It's post-punk for the end of the world" - Jonah Krueger, Consequence”.

The first interview I want to highlight is from March of last year. Their E.P., Conditions, came out a couple of months later. There was a lot of heat and excitable buzz around the group then. There is even more now. Rolling Stone spoke with the Belfast experimentalists. They also discussed forming a band in lockdown and making music bound to their city’s history:

“While acts on separate ends of this spectrum are producing exciting and boundary-pushing music, some of the most interesting music comes from those blending the two. Alongside the likes of Just Mustard and Enola Gay, Belfast’s Chalk draw from both post-punk and techno to make their intriguing, metallic racket.

Forming in the pandemic, the trio – formerly working together in a garage rock-type project – indulged their love of harsh and noisy electronic music to make debut EP Conditions, all without playing a single gig.

When they did start playing shows as we exited the pandemic, Chalk became a meatier sonic proposition, a change reflected in Conditions’ sequel EP, out now on Nice Swan Records. On it, they make rock songs imbued with the rattling synths and wobbling bass of techno. Whether it’s the pummelling sonics of ‘The Gate’, the foreboding slow burn of ‘Kevlar’ or the sweeping, widescreen synths of closer ‘Bliss’, everything is done with intensity at its core.

With their first proper tour ahead of them and new music on the horizon, the band discuss their beginnings, how playing live changed them, and how the complicated history of their hometown influences its signature sound.

What makes the Belfast electronic scene special, and how has it influenced the sound of Chalk?

Ross Cullen (vocals): If Chalk was a Dublin project, I don’t know where it would have ended up. You’re always pulling from influences around you, and we pulled from Belfast. At the start, we were trying to blend both the noise rock and industrial elements with a four-four kick, and living in Belfast – with the context of how huge the dance scene is here – was huge for us in terms of finding that starting point.

There’s something special here. We were talking to a promoter once and he was comparing Belfast and Berlin, these two cities with a lot of trauma. They both have this really pounding electronic dance scene. He called it ‘trauma techno’.

Benedict Goddard (guitar/synth): It’s a pretty apt description! It feels quite black-and-white – Dublin has guitar bands, Belfast has a dance scene – but it’s also correct.

You worked with Chris Ryan (Just Mustard, NewDad, Enola Gay) on Conditions II – what did he bring to the process?

Goddard: The guitars on the Just Mustard album was the reason we wanted to work with Chris. We were aware of the post-punk scene happening in Ireland, but it was a slow realisation. When we were writing the initial songs, we couldn’t even see any live music.

Cullen: Chris nudged us in the direction of more electronic parts. We never would have thought to include drum machine parts, but he helped us bring it all in.

Alongside your more electronic elements, what do you like about what the guitar brings to Chalk?

Goddard: The performance element is really important to us. There’s a certain physicality to the guitar that we really love. Then there are songs that I’m just playing a sampler for. As a groundwork, the guitar is the instrument I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and it lends itself to the stage. The sampler is its own other kind of beast. We want to incorporate more and more instruments as time goes on.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mathieu Zazzo

Does this straddling of genres extend to your live shows too? Do you like the idea of playing alongside a line-up of DJs as well as punk bands?

Cullen: At our first ever gig, we played with an ambient drum-and-bass artist and others. Curating that sort of night is important to us, so it’s not just three bands that sound the same. We had a DJ at another show alongside a band with sax and violin. We’re very open to making sure there’s a nice mix on the night. I’d love to do the late-night festival slots too though.

Does the word ‘band’ sit comfortably with you to describe Chalk? You play guitars and drums but it’s far from a traditional band setup…

Goddard: Did we throw around the idea of calling it a ‘project’ before we ever played live?

Cullen: We did! We were sick of writing that we were a band.

Goddard: I don’t really care now. We’re not big enough to be pigeonholed yet. We’re just happy that people are listening.

What else is coming up for Chalk?

Cullen: We’ve always been the kind of band to think a year or two ahead. We’re already thinking about a longer project and an album. It’s exciting for us to have these two EPs that people have come to really connect with, and we can’t wait to go and play it live. We’re especially excited to play Belfast – whenever I think about playing these songs live, I think about Belfast”.

In October, The Rock Revival celebrated a trio brilliantly and originally mixing Techno and Post-Punk. There is no doubt they are going to be playing festivals through the summer. If you are not follow Chalk at the moment then make sure that you do. You will want to keep a track of what is happening in their world:

“Chalk’s racket sound is original in their scene, but increasingly to where they’re from. Belfast isn’t a city specifically known for its guitar music despite its talents, with electronic dance music taking the reins of the city thanks to now universal acts like Bicep. Originally taking a while to craft their identity, the band looked to their cities biggest scene.

“There is a bit of a spirit that this place has, and has always had thanks to the shape the music scene has formed. Obviously dance music is the massive genre here, and it’s where we look towards for our sound. We leaned more to electronic nights in Belfast initially, but we then looked to Dublin where that boom of guitar music was happening, like Fontaines D.C and The Murder Capital, and we wanted to have both of those genres in mind when making something. We never really saw ourselves as a band initially, so we looked at DJs for influence and then tried to merge the two to create something original to ourselves.”

While definitely considering themselves an Irish band, Chalk music doesn’t match what some might think of traditional Irish music. It goes further than that, with Ben stating they want their music’s themes to feel universal.

“With our lyrics, we like them to work in a more abstract way to invoke feelings rather than explicitly saying something. National identity is something that we’ve talked about exploring in future projects, though. We’re in our mid twenties, but a lot of people growing up here have a bit of a crisis with their identity, I’ve definitely felt that and others have too. Being torn into saying whether you’re British, Irish, Northern Irish. I think the EPs have alluded to that in a way, not knowing what to do in the context of this country”.

The result of all of their influences comes through on their recently released single, ‘Tell Me’, thanks to its electronic drums and intense post-punk inspired vocal performance. They recorded the track in Iceland after receiving an artist’s fund. “Yeah, I don’t think we’d be able to afford to go over with our own wallets”, laughed Ross.

“We didn’t get out much while there. The recording studio was in a really recluse part of the country, we had to drive three or four hours in a snowstorm to get there. It was a great experience, though, and we’re really proud of what we produced there.”

Quickly approaching the release of their third EP in as many years, Chalk can testify from firsthand experience the pressure on new bands now to be a constant outlet of work, whether it be from recording or touring.

“I think the best thing we can do is to not rush anything. We’re trying to learn to find that balance, but it’s difficult with festivals, tours and writing our own material. You’d love to take as much time as possible, but the clock feels as though it’s ticking in a way. In this industry, it’s important to stay consistent”.

I am finishing with a recent interview from DIY. If you are new to them then I would start at the beginning and work forward. You can hear and feel the evolution. There is a lot of anticipation and excitement around Conditions III. This is a going to be their year for sure:

“Taking all the best bits of the last decade’s post-punk boom (an unflinching lack of façade and compellingly visceral delivery) and injecting them with the vitality and vigour of the dancefloor, their soon-to-be-trilogy of ‘Conditions’ EPs speak of a band for whom genre is but a word. “We met at film school, and we were big fans of the whole post-punk scene as well, so I think we were maybe writing stuff like that ourselves,” guitarist and synth player Benedict (Ben) Goddard explains, speaking about the band’s earliest days. “But that just seems like such an easy solution when you’re first writing music together, and there are other bands we love like Holy Fuck – ” he pauses, endearingly apologising for swearing “ – that really drive into that electronic soundscape. Those sounds just excite us a lot more.”

Feeding off what drummer Luke Niblock calls Belfast’s “very strong, punky ethos”, the trio (completed by vocalist Ross Cullen) spent “maybe two years” honing their sound, splicing their guitar band DNA with the city’s digital proclivities before diving headfirst into the world of live performance – the context in which they arguably thrive the most. “The live set is always something we’ve been quite proud of since the start,” Luke confirms. “We like to play with emotion in how we structure it; we didn’t want it to just be ‘crash, boom, wallop’.” Instead, he continues, they “adapt the tension throughout the set”, offsetting more atmospheric moments with “an explosion of one of those more guitar-centric tracks.”

The beauty of releasing ‘Conditions’ as they have – as three separate, but linked, EPs – Ross explains, is that it’s allowed them to push the envelope while still maintaining the same thematic or atmospheric touchstones. “There’s a feeling of euphoria and anxiety we’ve been going between since the first EP, which felt right to continue to explore,” he affirms. “But I think we’re moving away from the abstract world [of earlier tracks] and beginning to find comfort in realism and more personal subjects.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Cunningham

Sonically, the original ‘Conditions’ (2023) foregrounds weighty rock breakdowns, while ‘Conditions II’ (2024) and its forthcoming final piece ‘Conditions III’ (2025) lean far more into electronica, utilising sampling for a collagic masterclass in tension and release. Take the latter’s pummelling lead single ‘Tell Me’; much like the viral interview in which Charli xcx walks us through the sonic arc of ‘365’’s night out, it encodes a whole emotional journey in under three minutes, moving from anxiety-inducing closeness to stabbing synths that recall Psycho’s famous shower scene. Elsewhere, the tightly-coiled spring of ‘Afraid’ (the cut we suspect Luke has in mind when he speaks of “a big riff track”) erupts into driving guitars, echoing IDLES as much as Orbital, while ‘Pool Scene’ and ‘Leipzig 87’, Ross notes, make use of a Moog One synthesiser to “go deeper into the ‘club sound’.”

In a marked change from busy Belfast, this latest EP also saw the band upsticks to rural Iceland to record – a location which both thoroughly satisfied their cinephile tendencies, and injected a healthy dose of delirium into proceedings. “We didn’t see darkness for about a week, and I’m sure that just does something to your head,” Ben says cheerily. “Once, we were in the insane heat of the studio’s hot tub, then I was recording a guitar take literally two minutes later in a robe.” He grins: “I was like, ‘Should we be doing this?’ And our producer was like, ‘This is when we’ll get the great stuff!’” By the sound of Chalk’s third instalment, he wasn’t wrong”.

For those new to Chalk, you should dive right in. I am excited to see where they head next and what they accomplish this year. After a successful and busy 2024, things will get even hotter and better for the trio! Building up an impressive and loyal fanbase, so many eyes are turning the way of Chalk. Hardly a surprise! This is a group that has the potential to go so far ad endure for years. If that is not recommendation enough…