The story of the Belfast indie-punk trio Mob Wife begins in Chengdu, China. “I finished uni, and I didn’t really want to get a ‘real job,’ because all my friends were going into call centres, and I was doing the hospitality thing, and I kind of went, ‘I don’t really want to do this; I kind of just want to go and do something else’,” their frontman, Chris Leckey, explained when he spoke to us. “So, I got the opportunity to just go to China. It was fun. It was really weird, but it was cool.”

He continues, “Coming from Belfast, which is a tiny city in Europe, with a population of probably like 250,000, and going to China’s sixth biggest city, which has a population of eleven million, was jarring, to say the least. It was tough work.”

But after eight months in China, Chris grew tired of it and wanted to return home. “I especially missed making music, because I found it really difficult to connect with anyone out there, especially not knowing the language,” he explains.

“And, from what I could gather, I couldn’t really see any alternative scene out there, especially anything with punk music. I think because the government’s probably so oppressive, it’s a bit difficult for that to flourish, and I never really found that, so I came home and started this.”

At the time of his return, Chris was getting back to his punk and noise roots and was also listening to indie rock. He lists bands like Constantines, Pile, Ovlov, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, and Fugazi as indicators of his taste at the time.    

Mentioning that he was listening to a Pile record on repeat while he worked at a pharmaceutical company, Chris says, “They were the real ones, where I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that I want to do, where it is rooted in a punk sound and it has that more indie tinge to it, but it is quite artistic and self-aware,’ and I tried to sort of mimic that.”

Chris had played in a litany of bands of various influences, and, in college, had started a “folksy, sort of country-esque, emo-y” solo project called Via: Barvikha, which he enjoyed doing but found difficult to maintain after returning from China. He also wanted to be in a band again and write in the style of the aforementioned influences, so Via: Barvikha morphed into Mob Wife.

The first iteration of the band featured the two musicians that Chris was playing with in Via: Barvikha: The producer Carl Small (whom Chris had met at a house party not long after returning) on bass, and Mark McDaid on drums. Later, Chris’s longtime friend, Wilson Davidson (whom Chris had met while attending all-ages D.I.Y. shows at a local church as a teen, went to the same college with, and played in the bands Steering Fail and PigsAsPeople with) would replace Mark when he was no longer available.  

Interestingly, the three members don’t cultivate much overlap. “I think Metz are one of the only bands that all three of us actually all love,” Chris says. “I’m trying to think of bands that all three of us are in on. Metz is one of them. We all really like KoЯn! I went through a real phase, where I went back, listening to a lot of KoЯn. […] So, I think KoЯn and Metz are the only two bands that we’re all like, ‘Yeah, this band’s good.’ Oh, and King Gizzard, as well; we all really like King Gizzard. So, yeah, those are the only three bands, I think! [Laughs]”

Mob Wife began releasing music in 2018, and, in April 2022, they released their critically-acclaimed debut album, called Eat With Your Eyes, which was nominated for a Northern Ireland Music Prize award for Album of the Year. “It was genuinely unexpected, to be honest with you,” Chris says. “Whenever we got nominated for that, I was like, ‘Cool. We’re not going to win!’ [Laughs]

“I think it was Robocobra [Quartet] who won that year, and they’re really good friends of mine. I used to live with those guys, and it was so funny, because we were both living in the same house, and my bedroom was below Chris’s [W. Ryan] studio where he would have wrote a lot of the songs, and I was just listening to him writing some of those songs through my ceiling, and I was trying to write what would eventually become our album, below him.

“But, no, it was cool going to that. It was vindicating in a way, because it was kind of like, ‘Oh, OK, we have actually done something fairly substantial here, that deserves some sort of nomination.’ So, we were quite grateful for it. We knew, ‘There’s not a chance we’re going to win this,’ because we were up against some pretty heavy-hitters, but it was cool going to the Ulster Hall, and hearing our music playing in the Ulster Hall, and hearing someone talking about our album. So, it was cool.”

After the release of Eat With Your Eyes, Mob Wife released a standalone single, “The Oil In It,” the following year, and then began the cycle for a new album, which went through numerous revisions before having its scope reduced, resulting in their debut EP. “The writing for that EP took way longer than it ever needed to take,” admits Chris.

“They always say, ‘You have your whole life to write your first album [, then you have a year to do your second].’ [With Eat With Your Eyes] we had the benefit of lockdown, because I wasn’t working and you couldn’t go outside, so I was just like, ‘Well, I’m just going to write.’

“So, I wrote most of it during COVID. Then, after we finished the album, I always have this thing where any time I finish a body of work, I always like to listen back to it, and almost kind of audit it and check it, just to be like, ‘Well, that was good. That wasn’t good. I don’t want to do that anymore. That was good.’ So, we kind of did that with it.

“I think one of the general criticisms I always had for the album was that a lot of the songs were too drawn-out. I think the reason is because it was just me writing them, and I was kind of bringing them to the lads, eventually, in a practice space, and then we kind of just went off that and just recorded them, when we should have probably hammered on them a little more and refined them a bit more. Listening back, there are parts to it where I’m like, ‘This is a little bit raw. This should have been refined a little bit better.’

“So, whenever we started to write again, we were like, ‘OK, well, we’ll just do an album,’ because that’s the next logical step, is to just do a second album. And, as it started going, we wrote maybe upwards of fifteen to twenty songs in the two years it took to write the EP, and these five were the ones that we were like, ‘OK, this is it!’”

After two years of refinement, the band’s debut EP, ROT, was released at the beginning of the month. During the making of the EP, Chris was inspired by his dissatisfaction towards the gentrification of Belfast. This thematic direction was spurred by Chris’s first-hand experience witnessing the corruption within the rental market.

This disdain was then perpetuated by his walks through the city centre, where he saw local businesses and cultural centres being dismantled and replaced by costly Airbnb’s and student accommodations, which he felt weren’t benefiting residents but rather vulture fund investors’ portfolios.

“I never wanted Mob Wife to be a political band,” Chris asserts. “I just never really saw us being a political band, or being a band that comments on politics. I think there are bands at the moment that do that really, really well. Like, bands like Problem Patterns, that’s their bread and butter, and so it should be, and so it will be, but that’s not how I saw us as, because I was like, ‘Well, who gives a shit what we think?’

“But I think that sort of stuff made me want to write about it a bit more, in a more sort of comical way that pokes fun at it. It sort of awakened a part of me that I didn’t know, because I was kind of struggling with lyric-writing for a while, then I was just like, ‘Well, if I do this kind of funny…like, if I go back to the old playbook of Jello Biafra, who I love, and Dead Kennedys and stuff, it’s there. I can do this.’ I kind of tapped into that a little bit more.”

Expanding on overcoming his aversion to politically themed songs, Chris explains, “I think it’s essential that there are some bands that sing about certain issues, but they have to be coming from that point of view. Like, I don’t think that we should write a feminist rally song; not because we’re not feminists, but because we don’t have those lived-in experiences.

“But, I do think that I have that lived-in experience of feeling like I’m being pinched at all times by landlords, and real estate developers, and stuff like that. It’s something that I feel directly affected by, and, at the end of the day, I’ve always viewed music as a very cathartic experience. I don’t do it for money, I don’t really do it for other people to listen to; I do it for me to get my aggression, and my feelings, and my frustrations out, and putting it out for the world, and if someone resonates with it, that’s cool.

“I know there’s been examples, where I’ve seen bands that try to tap into the political mindset in some way, of other things, and it’s kind of tone-deaf, because it’s like, ‘You don’t really know that. You think you know that; you think that that’s something that will affect you, or you think that you have an educated guess on that, but you don’t.’ So, I think you have to have those experiences, and you have to have those feelings in order to kind of genuinely portray the zeitgeist of it.”

Mob Wife’s latest EP, ROT, is out now. The band will perform a launch gig for the EP at the Union Bar, Belfast, on the 28^th, with special guests Broncos and Loom. Tickets are available here. You can keep up with the band here.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (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.