As a kid in the ‘90s, Kieran Murphy remembers seeing a session player supporting an act on Top of the Pops who played a beautiful cherry-red Stratocaster. Enamoured, he would not let up until his parents got him a guitar.. Recollecting now with Post-Burnout, Kieran says, “When I was a kid, I had to beg my parents for, I’d say, a couple of years until, eventually, for a birthday or Christmas or something, I got a cheap, copy Telecaster, and then I got a cheap, beginners amplifier.”

He soon began taking guitar lessons and played in bands from his adolescence. But it wasn’t until he was an adult that he began crafting original songs. The impetus was boredom during the COVID-19 lockdowns.  “I was upstairs – I’ve a room where I keep all my amps and guitars and stuff – and I was playing along, and I said, ‘You know what I must do? I must start learning licks from all of these songs that I loved over the years but I’ve never actually played,’” Kieran recalls.

“So, I was learning away licks and messing around with my amps and stuff, copying sounds of some of my favourite guitar players and stuff that they did – like weird sounds and different delay things – and, all of a sudden, it got to a point where I was searching for something new, and I was like, ‘Where’s all the new guitar music? Where are all the bands?’ [Laughs]

“Nearly all of the artists that have been in popular music, you can say for the last ten years at least, have been solo artists. […] So, I just started messing around with different sounds on the guitar and, all of a sudden, a riff came to my head, and I was like, ‘Jesus, that’s really cool,’ and something just clicked with me, there and then. I was like, ‘Why don’t you just try making your own music?’”

For his tunes, Kieran was inspired by the music of his youth. “An awful lot of the modern music just doesn’t do it for me,” he admits. “When I started learning guitar when I was a kid, back in the ‘90s, the bands that were big at the time were the Manics, Oasis, The Verve, and, when I was going to guitar lessons, the guitar teacher was teaching me stuff from Dire Straits, Guns N’ Roses, and American bands.

“So, the genre of that time and those bands are still, to this day, what I listen to. That organic, stands-the-test-of-time music. That fast food music that has come since […] that some musicians might be drawn to, I was never really drawn to it. It just didn’t do it for me because it just didn’t have the same energy, the same soul as that music did. So, I suppose that’s why our songs have that flavour that it has; that kind of indie, Britpop sound is my favourite type of music in the whole world. It was just a golden time for music, I think.”

Before the pandemic, Kieran had been involved with a band that he began with a college friend. “I was studying in Athlone, and all the lads are from Athlone –  I’m about an hour from there; I’m from Roscommon – but Jerome [Sheerin], who’s the other rhythm guitarist, was in my class, so we’ve been friends for years,” he says.

“Then Cormac [Sheerin], on bass, would be Jarome’s cousin. They’re first cousins in the band! It’s so Irish! [Laughs] Then Eammon [O’Toole, their drummer] happens to be from Athlone but was in college in Galway with Cormac, as well, and Cormac had played in a covers band with Eamonn before that broke up, and I had played in a covers band with Cormac a few years ago that went its ways, as well. You know yourself, when you’re younger, in your teenage years, bands come and go like fast food, you know? You’re lucky if they last months. Relationships and girlfriends come along and whatever else.

“But we originally got together for this band…We were already formed as a trad rock band – because Jerome is a really accomplished button-key accordion player, as well – so it was myself who came up with the idea of doing what Sharon Shannon does with trad music. She puts a fusion of flavour to it, whether it’s reggae, rock, [or] blues, and I love that. So, that’s how we had originally formed and met, and we were doing covers stuff, as well. We did an EP of that trad stuff under a different name.”

Kieran began recording demos of his originals on his phone and sending them to the lads from his previous band, who were receptive to his ideas and began contributing. Thus, The Halez were born.

From its inception, Kieran had some prerequisites for The Halez; primarily that they would record with organic instruments. “I insisted on that from day one,” he tells, “because, some of the studios we went into, the guys who owned them or the engineers there were like, ‘Oh, would you not just program them?’ because they didn’t want the work. They were like, ‘But, sure, everyone programs it now, or 99%,’ and I was like, ‘No, because I’ll know it’s programmed,’ and I said, ‘It never sounds the same!’

“Even the biggest records at the minute, when I’m in my car and I have the radio on, and some stuff that’s in the top ten in America and is meant to be of a country artist and it’s programmed. Country music, to me, outside of rock, was always nearly the purest form of recording, in that when other genres went digital in the ‘80s and stuff and programmed drums, they didn’t. They always stayed true and kept with microphones, their analogue desks, and bringing in fiddles and steels and everything. Whereas now, I listen to some of the stuff that’s meant to be coming out of Nashville, and, to me, it sounds like a pop record with a little bit of fiddle thrown on top.”

Another prereq was a commitment to spreading positivity. Finding a lot of current music to be, both sonically and lyrically, negative, Kieran instead wanted The Halez to have a contrasting energetic and upbeat vibe. “Billy [Farrell], our producer, when he heard the songs, he said, basically, ‘You’re a festival band’,” Kieran says. “Having gone to some festivals, myself, and having heard some of these negative-sounding energy acts or singer-songwriters, and people are just standing there. They can’t chant, they can’t let that energy go, and, for me, it just all feels wrong. We’re standing in a field and [Laughs] nobody’s dancing and nobody’s going crazy.

“I was at Liam Gallagher, there last summer, and when they came out and played ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ in the 3Arena, all you could see was pints being thrown in the air. The energy in the room, it was just class, you know what I mean? It was like, ‘This is where it’s at.’”

After about two years of crafting a songbook, the band worked with the aforementioned producer Billy Farrell (whose clientele includes The Corrs, Westlife, and Ryan Sheridan, among many others) across 2022 to record eight tracks, as Billy preferred to take each song one at a time. After another year, the band had eventually recorded an album’s worth of material, but, at the advice of management, they decided to dole out their material through singles, with their debut track, “Charlie,” releasing last summer.

“With our music, we had it ready to release a long time before we actually released ‘Charlie,’ and the reason that we held ‘Charlie’ back or any song back, we didn’t know what song was going to be our first release because, to us, all of our songs are good,” laughs Kieran. “You know that kind of way? Of course, everyone thinks their own songs are good, but they’re all so different, as well. […] With me, I write a song around the song and, just because one might have a certain flavour to it, the next song will have a completely different flavour to suit what I think that song is.

“We found that the big trouble we had when we were picking songs is that we have twelve singles or eleven singles – whatever’s on the album – they all sound like possible good singles for me, and they’re all so different. The manager… – unspoken, won’t mention his name – …he was the one that was drawn to ‘Charlie.’ So, he was the one that picked ‘Charlie,’ because, with me, I’d nearly want to put a raffle ticket to see which song we’d put out there first because I couldn’t decide. So, it was a good thing.

“We were like, ‘Right, “Charlie” it is. Let’s put that out first and see how it goes.’ Then we put out ‘Come Day Go Day’ because one of the lads in the band said, ‘Look, “Come Day Go Day” is probably the most similar-sounding song to “Charlie,” so if they like us on the back of “Charlie,” we should go for that one. And we just released the ‘Faces and Places’ nearly as a soft release. We didn’t push it too much. It was never going to be a song that we thought would be a single, though some people love it.”

Last month, the band released their first single of the year, “Coming for You,”  an addictively melodic track with an almost glam-like beat that was recorded at the tail end of the pandemic. “Some of the guitars and some of the vocals that you’re hearing on the track were actually recorded in Jerome’s shed because we couldn’t get into a studio,” Kieran says.

“Because what happened was, you know the Arts Grants that they were giving out at the time? People got grant money to go and record, and the studios happened to be backlogged then. There were people going in recording that never recorded before in their lives [Laughs] just because they had the money, there, to do it, you know? So, it made the recording process a little bit difficult for us.”

“Coming for You” was recorded as part of the extended sessions for The Halez’s debut album, which is expected to drop soon. “I think we’re going to release a couple of more singles [first], and, maybe, come around summertime, we might get the album out there,” Kieran says of their release plans.

“We’re just purely musicians; we’re not in any way businessmen at all, so we’re playing it one day at a time, you know? So, my gut just says summertime. It feels more natural, and the songs are high-energy, good-energy, upbeat songs, as well, so I think summertime is a nice time of year when people are feeling more positive and the sun is out for two days and it goes away again!”

Additionally, The Halez are looking to play some shows in the UK and some festivals this year. “Festivals is where it’s at,” Kieran says. “So, hopefully now, we get on a few of those bigger summer festivals because the music is festival music and I think we’ll get a really good reaction.”

Kieran concludes the interview by reflecting on his decision to start The Halez, stating, “I’m so grateful for it and delighted. It’s one of the best things that ever happened to me because no matter how it goes for us, we have an album that I’m so proud of, and it would never have happened, only for the lockdown because I suppose I was just so content in doing covers and happy with that, and now that I’ve become an original artist. I don’t enjoy covers anymore, as much as I used to. There’s nothing like performing your own song live to someone, especially if they know the lyrics and they’re singing along. It’s kind of like, ‘Yes!’ There’s no payment or no amount of anything that can give you a satisfaction like that.”

The Halez’s latest single, “Coming for You,” is on all streaming platforms now. You can keep up with the band through their Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full, where we expand on all that was discussed in this article, as well as talk about the music industry today, kids listening to and learning from the music of yesteryear and what that means, and much more. 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.