Bricknasty are an act that have been gaining significant recognition over the past two years. Having performed with Aby Coulibaly when she supported Coldplay at Croke Park last month, they have now released a new mixtape – XONGZ አስቀያሚ ጡብ – their second recording following 2023’s EP Ina Crueler. Later this month, they perform at the Cork Jazz Festival before embarking on a UK tour.

Ina Crueler – whose songs explored frontman and guitarist Fatboy’s experience of growing up in Ballymun – saw them sign to UK label FAMM, which is also releasing XONGZ አስቀያሚ ጡብ (the second part of the title is in Amharic, reflecting bassist Dara Abdurahman’s Ethiopian family heritage). That debut was a dynamic mix of dreamy soundscapes, soft jazz-inflected sax, bouncy electronics, old-school R&B vocals, indie guitar hooks and excerpts of spoken word. On their new record they have developed their cohesion as a band, and also their genre-blending sound. In the current Irish music industry – and perhaps even further afield – their sound is distinct, exciting and recognisably theirs. 

In addition to their recordings, they also curated a series of improvisational nights in the Sugar Club in Dublin over the past couple of years, working with artists such as Aby Coulibaly, Kojaque, Maverick Sabre and KhakiKid.

Origins
The band formed initially when Fatboy and producer Cillian McCauley were teenagers and discovered each other’s Soundclouds, leading them to collaborate and write much of the material that would end up on Ina Crueler. Subsequently studying music at BIMM in Dublin, the full band came together through jamming sessions. It now also includes bassist Dara Abdurahman, saxophonist and keyboardist Louis Younge, and Korey Thomas on drums.

An extremely wide range of musical influences have informed the band’s sound. According to Abdurahman, the band look to, among other sounds, Irish folk and indie and ‘soul and R&B stuff, in terms of colouring the sound of the band, but also reaching from 2000s indie-pop influences.’ He adds:

Korey was a big metalhead when we started and I’d be more into ambient music sometimes, Fatboy listens to some club, house, electronic stuff. We all have our own pockets, but it all kind of comes back into the band in a weird way, just in terms of how things are even arranged. There’s always a conversation around our tastes that kind of colours that.

Irish R&B and jazz musicians such as bassist, guitarist, and composer Neil Dorrington, drummer Dylan Lynch and neo-soul guitarist Max Zaska have also been a significant influence on the band in terms of style but also as instrumentalists. ‘I would have seen them in the Sugar Club when I was a teenager and it just set me on this path entirely,’ said Abdurahman. ‘They’ve done it really well and have kind of now bred a new generation of people who are playing that kind of music in Dublin,’ added Younge.

The choice to blend these different genres and styles in their own way was a conscious decision from the very beginning. ‘We always wanted to be able to do dance stuff… we want to have jazz, we want to have R&B. We want to have as many different flavours as we can, but still keeping it authentic,’ said Fatboy.

Through their recording process for the EP, they embraced a raw DIY ethos, with some tracks recorded on phones, such as ‘Grace of God’. ‘We’ve recorded in the back of people’s cars, fire escapes. Wherever we can record, we’ll record. Whatever we can use, we’ll use’, said Fatboy. ‘It kind of is how we operate as people,’ added Abdurahman. ‘On a logistical level… recording DIY and not having to save up loads of money to go to the studio allows us the time and freedom that the music really needs, that the music can’t really exist without’. He continued: ‘That phone recording was the essence of the thing so it stayed… The weight is on the quality of the art and not the quality of the microphone’.

Bricknasty Sessions
In 2022 and 2023, the band curated a series of improv nights at the Sugar Club that they titled the Bricknasty Sessions. These concerts featured the band performing with a vast line-up of musicians, rappers and producers, where they would perform as their band for the night. ‘They’d bring a set of music to us, we’d learn it and put our own little twist on it and do it with them… it elevated our musical acumen,’ said Abdurahman. ‘A lot of what made those nights so good was that we didn’t know what was going to happen, the artists didn’t know and the crowd was just along for it… it’s something we really enjoy doing as a band.’

Artists that featured in the Bricknasty Sessions include Aby Coulibaly, R&B singer Shiv, alternative R&B artist Monjola, rappers KhakiKid, Curtisy and Ahmed with Love, producer and singer F3miii, and neo-soul singer Tomike. In January of this year, the band hosted a gig with Maverick Sabre and Kojaque in the Sugar Club, and this month, as part of the Cork Jazz Festival, they have curated a concert where they will perform with Shiv, Curtisy and F3miii at the Cork Opera House (27 October).

XONGZ አስቀያሚ ጡብ
While Ina Crueler was based primarily on Fatboy’s upbringing, for this new record, the approach was more of a collective effort from the whole band.

Pieced together as a mixtape, rather than an EP or an album, the nine-track record is a collection of songs that the band began writing while touring Ina Crueler. ‘It’s a departure from the EP in the sense that it’s far less conceptual… there’s less of a grand narrative going on,’ said Abdurahman. This time around they used the Hellfire Studios in Dublin and jammed out new ideas, eventually recording.

‘I wrote some of the music on Ina Crueler when I was about 16… it just took that many years of recording and for everything to find its right home at the right time,’ said Fatboy. ‘For this one, we didn’t have another eight years for me to go through a coming of age story again… So we just got in, all together this time, and expedited it by just not being precious’. They took a disciplined, experimental approach to the process:

We’d write down a key signature and write down a BPM and then write down a time signature. We wrote down like 24 different ones. We went through every key, we went through every BPM and we went through as many time signatures as we could and we weren’t allowed repeat ourselves.

In addition to experimenting with keys and time signatures, the band tried different styles and sounds. ‘We might say, this is a Latin flavour, this is a house flavour, this is a folk flavour. That was how some of the ideas came about,’ said Fatboy.

Abdurahman adds: ‘There was a rule that we made was that we couldn’t judge a thing as we were making it. The order of the day was idea generation and not curation, so it meant that we came out with 24 ideas and then the next day we figured out if they were good’.

Improvisation is also a key element of the band’s performance, songwriting and recording process. ‘Two of the songs on the mixtape were completely improvised and they were first-take – then we just did arrangements over them. So there’s about six or seven minutes of music there that you’re hearing for the first time and it was our first time hearing it as well,’ said Fatboy. The two tracks are the smooth jazz-infused ‘Reprise’ and the breathy ballad ‘Alone for this’.

As the band has shifted its focus towards songwriting, recording and touring for their records, the Bricknasty Sessions have become less frequent and now occur as occasional gigs. Despite this change, the experience gained in fine-tuning during those sessions – along with working in a tight-knit Irish music scene – has helped tighten their sound and performance.

‘As we grow, it feels like maybe that super close-knit sense of community you get when you have a scene… since we started touring in the UK and playing in Ireland less, that element of it is dissolving a little bit which I’m kind of sad to see,’ said Abdurahman. ‘But also it’s grown in so many great ways as well, that I feel like that will come back around full circle at some stage.’ ‘The community is still very much there and it’s something that’s really central to us as a band’, added Younge.

Bricknasty play the Cork Jazz Festival on 27 October and tour the UK in October and November. They will also perform in The Hague, Paris, Dublin and Cork in November and December and will be the support act for Nas’ Olympia gig next month. XONGZ አስቀያሚ ጡብ is out now on FAMM. Visit bricknasty.com.

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