Maybe it’s that late-summer fade. Maybe 2024’s potency has dried up. Or maybe the real shit is happening elsewhere just out of public view. But it’s been a minute since a new track has made us want to run through a fucking wall, which is why we’re grateful for Skinner, the Irish no wave provocateur who unleashed powderkeg single “Tell My Ma” last week (September 12) to set a breakneck tone for forthcoming October disco-noise EP Geek Love.
“Tell My Ma” is 86 seconds of primal, fidgety explosiveness, finding Dublin-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer Aaron Corcoran taking a tattered page from the New York scene of the late-’70s and early-’80s and filtering it through the Irish experience. It slashes and thrashes with raw fury and doesn’t give itself any chance of overstaying its welcome, instead escaping down a mental alleyway before a collected breath can be taken.
“I wrote this as a spin off to the old Irish folk song for children ‘I’ll Tell My Ma’. I remember my mam used to sing it to me when I was a child and it’s always stuck with me as a kind of comfort song,” Skinner says. “I think as you get older it’s funny how things you think are innocent as a child take on a more sinister meaning when you read into them as an adult. Lyrically I think the original folk song hasn’t particularly aged too well in terms of relevance to gender equality or what is now deemed as acceptable in society so I wanted to take the lyrics and recycle them by screaming and shouting them in anger and protest instead of the jovial way the song is usually sung.”
Pack a sprint below.
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