Now the lead vocalist and the rhythm guitarist for the Belfast-based experimental indie-alt rock band ANOMALyS, Stephen Moreland’s interest in becoming a musician was sparked when he was a primary school kid. “There was this local girl that my mum knew,” he recollects, in conversation with Post-Burnout.

 “She was about 16 and she just wanted to give piano lessons – she was a daughter of my mum’s friend – and my mum was just like, ‘Yeah.’ And I do think, obviously not forcing it, but it’s good to give kids the option at such a young age because when you’re that young and formative, it really…like, I know right now if I didn’t have those lessons, I wouldn’t be able to teach myself piano. I just wouldn’t.”

After learning how to play the piano and perfecting his capabilities on his own, he then taught himself to play guitar. Despite this knowledge and interest, he never had the opportunity to form a band. “I never had any real musical friends that would want to start a band,” Stephen says.  “I recorded stuff trying to be…I guess, Ed Sheeran-y vibes; you know, trying to be a singer-songwriter. But I always wanted to do rock, but I just sort of never felt that I could, unless I had a band.”

The first opportunity to start a band came when Stephen was studying Physics at Queen’s University, Belfast. It was there that he met his future bandmate and ANOMALyS’s lead guitarist, Louis Orr. “In first year, we started right as COVID hit,” Stephen says. “So, we were the first year who got put completely, fully online from the start, and we were put in these tutorial groups for our first year – a module where you just met up each week and talked about assignments and stuff – and Louis was in the group, and I never spoke to him once, throughout the entire first year, ever, but, obviously, I knew of him because we did assignments together.”

When lockdowns eased, Stephen bumped into Louis on a night out, and Stephen invited him back to his place to hangout. There, they bonded over their mutual love of music and mutual disdain for physics. Stephen realised how great Louis was at guitar and showed him some demos he made during the lockdowns. When Louis was receptive to the demos, Stephen floated the idea of starting a project together.

“I released some of the songs, when Louis joined, under the name The ANOMALyS, with the same misspelling and everything, but I ended up hating the ‘The,’ so we dropped it,” Stephen remembers. In the summer of 2022, he enlisted his childhood friend Padraig Manning to play bass, who, in turn, enlisted his friend Luka Maxwell to play drums.

Stephen continues, “And I released all that stuff and a few of those songs are still floating about in our set in the band, but once we got a full thing together, it was better to just write collaboratively, I felt. Like, I would bring an idea and everyone else would add to it, and I prefer it like that. It’s so much better to be in a band than a solo artist, [Laughs] from my experience, at least.”

Before studying Physics, Stephen first chose a topic which made more sense to interests. “I actually spent half-a-year in Trinity in Dublin, studying Music,” he says. But the academic nature of studying music ruined his instinctive joy of the craft. He says, “That was my first choice, and, as much as I don’t like Physics, it allowed me to come home and put all my creative output into music; whereas when I was studying Music, going to all the lectures, writing all the essays and stuff, I would come home and I would just have no desire to sit at the piano or guitar and try and write something, because you’re putting all your energy [into the academia] and then your ears are drained, and you lose the spark of songwriting. And the one thankful thing I will say about Physics is it’s allowed me to take back music as a positive in my life.”

The members of ANOMALyS (quite fittingly, considering their name) make up quite the motley crew. Even at just their initial two-piece incarnation, Stephen cited Randy Newman, Elton John, and Bob Dylan as influences, whereas he cited Louis’s influences as Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, and Eric Clapton. Then you factor in their additional members, including their technical gearhead and esoteric-music-listening bassist and breakbeat-obsessed DJ drummer, and you get a very versatile mix of interests and sounds. This bricolage accumulation can be heard on their debut self-titled EP.

Released on November 24^th, the ANOMALyS EP features five songs, with each track giving no discernible hint at what its successor will sound like. “We have more than five songs written that we’ve been gigging with,” Stephen says, “but we sort of could kind of tell which ones [to record]. There were a few where we were like, ‘We can’t really record that so soon.’ And we knew that we had limited resources and time, so we thought, ‘OK, we’ll put out an EP, we’ll pick five songs,’ and we’ve just felt that those were our five strongest at that time, but we also knew it would be nice to get a load of different sounds in because it fits with the name of the band, and it’s a good thing to get out into the world as our first release; like, ‘We can do all of this.’ It was kind of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.”

As ANOMALyS continues to grow, the members – now in their final year at university – find themselves balancing the band with their schoolwork. While Stephen hopes that graduating will alleviate a lot of these restraining issues and help them grow the band’s reach, he pointedly makes one thing clear: “Anytime that it’s a hard choice between the band and uni, we tend to pick the band.”

ANOMALyS’s debut self-titled EP is available to stream now. You can keep up to date with the band’s music and follow their social media accounts here. The band play their first show in Dublin this Friday, when they open for Madra at the upstairs at Fibber Magees. Entry is free and doors are at 20:00.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.