Gilla Band release their fourth album, Pugnello, on Rough Trade — a record the Guardian's reviewer describes as "a thrilling and relentless 42 minutes of monstrous noise whose precise instrumental source always remains discomfitingly unclear."

The praise preceded it. A Pitchfork feature announcing the album this summer called Gilla Band "Ireland's most influential band since My Bloody Valentine." The claim might read like standard music-press hyperbole, but the feature backed it with testimony from the Dublin quartet's musical peers, all lining up to attest to the band's importance, originality and impact.

One of them, Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez — one half of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls — went further, saying about Gilla Band precisely what people said about My Bloody Valentine 35 years ago: "They basically reinvented guitar music."

It is the kind of endorsement that has earned Gilla Band a reputation as your favourite band's favourite band. Pugnello, then, arrives carrying real weight.

A power chord that will not stop

Given the buildup, there is something faintly disappointing about the album's opening, which rests on a very prosaic and familiar sound: someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar.

Then something disconcertingly odd happens. The power chord does not fade away. It just keeps going, for the best part of two and a half minutes.

That grinding drone underpins the opening track, The Angelus. Frantic bursts of warp-speed rhythm puncture it — bursts that would sound like drum'n'bass breakbeats were it not for the fact that they appear to be played live, on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares.

The drone eventually gives way to a series of ferocious, shuddering bass explosions. Overlaid on top is a sound that could, theoretically, be guitar feedback, but most evokes a dial-up modem.

Why the comparisons hold

The My Bloody Valentine comparison is not idle. Both bands share a commitment to noise whose origins stay deliberately ambiguous — the listener is never quite sure what instrument is producing what sound, and that uncertainty is central to the effect. Where My Bloody Valentine found prettiness in pulverising sound, Gilla Band channel what the album's reception has framed as cathartic aggression and absurdist confessions.

The 42-minute running time matters too. This is not sprawling experimental indulgence; it is a concentrated, furious dose of originality that rarely lets up.

Pugnello confirms what the peers' testimonials assert: Gilla Band operate at a level of invention that younger punk and noise acts openly cite as formative. Whether the album converts the unconverted — or simply rewards the faithful — is the question its release will now answer.