Indie Dock Music Blog

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adequate – go   
Let's get one thing straight from the off: the name is a provocation. adequate. Lowercase, deliberately modest, almost aggressively self-deprecating — the kind of title you choose when you know full well the music beneath it is anything but. It's the oldest trick in the rock and roll handbook, the shrug that conceals a clenched fist, and on the evidence of debut single "go," these smelly Wexford grungers — their words, worn like a badge of considerable honour — are playing the long game with considerable intelligence.

"go" arrives like a fist through drywall. Recorded at Orchard Recording Studio under the watchful ear of producer Brendan Carthy, it carries the kind of physical weight that most contemporary rock music has quietly forgotten how to lift. The guitar work has a girth to it, a deliberate, load-bearing quality that recalls the Pacific Northwest at its most righteously furious — Pearl Jam circa *Vs.*, when Eddie Vedder still sounded like a man genuinely wrestling with something. But adequate aren't content to simply genuflect before their influences. The Deftones' chromium-edged atmospherics bleed into the mix; so too does something of the coiled menace that made Faith No More so gloriously unclassifiable. Led Zeppelin's shadow falls long across the dynamics. Black Sabbath's earthen heaviness rumbles beneath the foundations. And somewhere in the middle distance, Radiohead's peculiar gift for making enormity feel intimate hovers like a ghost that refuses to be exorcised.


What is genuinely remarkable — and what elevates "go" beyond the territory of mere competent homage — is the circumstances of its creation. These musicians have not, at time of recording, shared a physical space. Ideas have passed between Wexford, Waterford, and Kildare through cables and compression algorithms, the Irish midlands functioning as some kind of distributed rehearsal room. You'd expect the result to sound fractured, provisional, held together with digital Sellotape. Instead, the track pulses with an organic coherence that bands who've spent years sweating together in damp practice rooms would kill for. Credit to Carthy for corralling these remote transmissions into something that breathes and surges like a living thing.


The song's thematic core — right place, right time, all roads converging — sounds deceptively simple, the kind of statement that could easily collapse into cliché. adequate make it feel like revelation. The momentum is relentless in the best sense: not frantic, not desperate, but purposeful, inexorable. This is music that knows precisely where it's going and intends to get there regardless of who or what stands between it and the destination.


British radio, forever chasing its own tail through landfill indie revivals and algorithmically assembled bedroom pop, would do well to pay attention. adequate sound like they've been stockpiling ammunition for years and have only now decided to start firing. With a full album already written and awaiting studio time, "go" functions less as a debut and more as a declaration of intent — a dispatch from the frontline of a campaign that is clearly only just beginning.


The southeast of Ireland has historically struggled for rock and roll oxygen against the gravitational pull of Dublin. adequate may be about to change that conversation entirely. This single is not a calling card. It's a demand.


*Watch this space. Watch it carefully.*