NewDad – Kick The Curb
Irish alt-rock band NewDad return with “Kick The Curb”, their first new single since last September’s Altar. The Galway four-piece — Julie Dawson, Áindle O’Beirn, and Seán Elliott O’Dowd Monaghan — announced last week they’d terminated their contract with Atlantic Records at their request, with Dawson writing in their newsletter that it was a move they had to make, a fresh start. “Kick The Curb” arrives on a303, and with it comes the news that more is on the way.
The track is produced and co-written by Liam McKay, who records and performs as sign crushes motorist, and that collaboration shapes the whole thing. Where NewDad’s post-punk edges sometimes gave way to grunge intensity on Altar, this one sits slower, more patient. Guitars stay soft. The pace doesn’t rush. Dawson’s voice holds the centre without pushing. The song is “about the end”, per the band’s own description — and the lyrics earn that reading, opening on a character called Claud who’s “kicked the curb”, cycling through nursery rhyme cadences in the outro: “Ring a ring a rosie / we all fall down”. It’s more subdued than much of their catalogue, and it works on that quieter register.
What I notice is how the outro commits to its logic — the children’s rhyme refrain landing somewhere between lullaby and elegy. It shouldn’t sit as comfortably as it does. Dawson’s writing has always been strong on specificity, and lines like “the dull thud in your chest” and “scythe of relief” carry real weight here. Stylistically this might read as a pivot from the minor-key intensity of Altar, but there’s no suggestion of softening — just a different kind of darkness.
NewDad’s newsletter promises more to come, with an announcement soon. If “Kick The Curb” is the opening move of a new era, it’s a considered one. I like where this is pointing.
