Fronted by Iona Lynch, Cliffords deal in a melody-rich, guitar-heavy merging of both shoegaze and grunge, all widescreen and cinematic in their scale and approach. Iona’s vocals, unrestrained and almost feral, arrowed above and beyond the sweatbox venues Cliffords are sure to be filling over the next twelve months.
It might be Ireland’s second biggest city, but Cork isn’t renowned for its pulsing cultural output, and whilst The Frank and Walters might resonate with a listener of a certain vintage, there’s little else paving the way for an ambitious young band kicking hard at the glass ceiling, and harbouring ambitions better aligned with those success stories 160 miles north in Dublin. But every kid picking up a guitar for the first time needs a local inspiration or torchbearer to prove that anything is possible, and Cliffords, with very little interest in become a big fish in a small pond, could soon become that very inspiration and prove that Dublin or Wicklow aren’t Ireland’s sole routes to getting out.
In Iona Lynch the band have a magnetic frontperson, smart, literate and wholly lost in her own music – an artist who has the potential to single-handedly influence a new generation inside of Cork and far out of it too. But for now we have Bittersweet, Cliffords’ emphatic first calling card.