While studying Physics at DCU, some musicians in Sophia Fronda’s course asked if she would fill in on vocals and drums for their band. “Honestly, I’ve never been that person that’s been like, ‘I wanna be an artist. I wanna be a musician. I wanna be on stage so bad’,” Sophia tells Post-Burnout.

Sophia’s artistic interests lay more in visual art, but her friends taught her the drums as they went. Inspired by playing with them, she also wanted to take up guitar. One of her bandmates offered her an unused Strat guitar and a Fender amp that was sitting in her grandparents’ house.

She began by learning basic chords and emulating the music of Green Day, Oasis, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. After the band split due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sophia began writing and recording some Clairo-inspired bedroom pop and accentuating them through GarageBand on an outdated MacBook, but never released them.

In 2023, Sophia matched with Ignas Baranauskas on Bumble. Ignas was a longtime guitar player who had studied the instrument for several years, had enrolled at BIMM, and was playing with the Dublin rock band KING CARA.

Seeing that Ignas was a musician, Sophia decided to show him some of the demos she had made, which already had a gazey glare on them. “We met up, went for a drink. We were dating,” Sophia explains. “We did try to date, but [Laughs] it was very short!”

While the relationship didn’t work out, Ignas did like Sophia’s demos, so they decided to form a project. “We were just writing music for a while,” Ignas says. “Putting some vocals over some old demos. And then, eventually, I got a gig for us, because I just thought, ‘Hey, why not? It’d be fun. It’s a good way to get this off the ground.’”

This was in the spring of 2024. At the time, the band had about five songs collectively, which were a mix of Ignas’s and Sophia’s originals. Their first gig was at Workman’s main room that April, with KING CARA, Martina and the Moons, and Skull the Pierre.

The music they were creating took inspiration from shoegaze, which has seen a revitalisation in popularity in recent years. “I think the sound of shoegaze resonates with people because it’s a mix between the feminine/angelic side and the harsh noise side of it,” theorises Ignas on its comeback.

“A lot of people kind of feel that way about the world, where it’s difficult to ignore all the awful shit that’s happening everywhere, but, at the same time, it is very beautiful – we know it is, and we see beautiful things all the time – and it’s difficult for people to reconcile with that. It’s a thing that people are constantly trying to do in their heads, on a conscious and subconscious level, and I think shoegaze is the musicalisation of that.”

Sophia feels that a lot of people are rediscovering shoegaze as it never really had its time in focus before the grunge movement overtook its popularity and notoriety. She adds, “I think it’s just a natural pendulum swinging. What they were doing in the 2010s was so polished, and there was also the sad folk and guitar music, and I think that’s a very natural response to it: ‘Let’s just get back into heavy guitars now, but not grunge, because we don’t want to do the same thing that we did before; just something similar to it.’ So, shoegaze.”

With a foundation in both bedroom pop and shoegaze, the music Sophia and Ignas ended up crafting had a certain melancholy. “It’s like, this could be pop, but it’s evil,” Sophia says of their sound. “Someone said, ‘Oh, it’s not dream pop, it’s like nightmare pop!’

“We get that a lot about our music. They tell us, ‘There’s something dark about this,’ and there is! [Laughs] I don’t know what it is, but there is! It might not be that obvious, but then you think about it, and you think, ‘There’s something dark here!’”

With their sound and songs solidified, all that was left was to christen the band. Their name, Skyless, is a tribute to Sophia’s late Yorkie.  “I had a dog named Sky, and as the band was forming and we were writing music, he passed away,” she explains. “He had liver cancer, and that is so rapid. Like, even in humans, as well, if you get that, you have a month or two left to live.

“So, he got diagnosed in, I wanna say, December [2023], and, by January [2024], we had to put him down. That’s why I’m very attached to the name, because I named it after him. The themes of our music, it explores loneliness, isolation, and, also, feelings of anger and dissociation. Like, a lot of introspection, but you’re so in your head that you feel so disconnected, as well, and I feel that the name really reflects that.

“He was a really bright part of my life… – and I think just dogs in general. I have a new dog now, and I love him so much – …and I think not having this bright light in my life felt skyless, because that was the effect it had on me. It just felt like when he was gone, I was like, ‘I don’t have this bright light in my life anymore.’ So, I felt it was very fitting for the project.”

Skyless spent 2024 building their live sound before releasing their debut single, “my lover, my runner,” that September. “We’re going one song at a time,” Ignas explains of their recording and release patterns. “With ‘my lover, my runner,’ I had made the demo in late 2023.

“It didn’t have any vocals on it, but it did have all the instrumentation done. Then I showed it to her, and she put some vocals on it, and we performed it at our first gig. It sounded great, we thought it had the most potential, and it was the most representative of our sound, so we went for that.”

Throughout 2025, the live opportunities for Skyless expanded. Throughout January to August, they consistently performed shows with the likes of Mother of Pearl, Tone Deaf, Joe Maxi, Dumb Posh Hippies, Virgins, Fragile Animals, Left Iris, and Dig Deep.

As a result of these commitments, it took them over a year to release their follow-up single, “Gasoline,” which dropped in October. “In between the end of May and the end of August, we had a little bit of a hiatus,” Sophia says.

“We weren’t posting on Instagram. Like, we weren’t doing anything, but, actually, during that time, when it seemed like we were on a hiatus, we were actually recording demos, because we were like, ‘Let’s have our songs recorded, just to have them recorded.’”

After they recorded the songs, they felt it was time to release a new single and maintain their momentum. Of the songs they had recorded, they chose “Gasoline” as it was the most consistent with their established sound. As such, they focused on properly mixing and mastering it.

“What I really like about ‘Gasoline,’ and just our music in general, but especially ‘Gasoline,’ is that we explore that [abrasive] sound, but with a female voice,” Sophia says. “And that’s something that I really like about music. It’s something I feel is missing. It’s also another reason I wanted it released. We need more female voices in this scene.”

For the song, Sophia took influence from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “The narrator of the song is angry at the other person just abandoning them, and you’ve created this whole thing with me, and now you’ve ignited the fire, and now we’re burning down, and this is all your fault,” Sophia says of the song’s themes.

“It almost parallels The Creature in Frankenstein, where Frankenstein made this life that he couldn’t cherish, and tried to discard it, and, eventually, they tried to burn The Creature down. So, that’s why I included that in it. Basically, a lot of destruction.”

Skyless are currently working on their debut EP, which is a collection of their recordings from August. “We have recorded everything that’s going to be on the EP,” Ignas states. They’re aiming to release it in the middle of next year, and they ensure that it will be released before GTA VI.

“It was definitely with the intent of it just being demos and showing it to people,” Sophia says of the EP. “Even now, we call it an EP, but I’m asking Iggy, ‘Can we just call it a mixtape or something?’ Because I feel like EPs, even though they’re not albums, I still feel like most of them are cohesive bodies of work.

“Whereas this is very much like a mixtape. It aligns more with what mixtapes are traditionally, which is to showcase an artist’s work, rather than being a cohesive body of work that has a certain theme. I would say, while our music generally has a theme, this body of work doesn’t.” “Sorry, guys, but none of the songs fade into each other!” laughs Ignas.

Skyless’ latest single, “Gasoline,” is out now. You can keep up with the band through their website.

Skyless will perform with Daire Patel and Veen at The Sound House on December 21^st. You can purchase tickets for that show here.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 22:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

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.