Pillow Queens at Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, review: band’s biggest concert is a triumph from start to finish

Pillow Queens

Iveagh Gardens, Dublin

★★★★☆

The stately, soulful indie-pop of Pillow Queens twinkles amid the dusk at Iveagh Gardens as the Dublin alternative four-piece play one of their biggest headline shows yet. “Is it a sad one?,” wonders singer Pamela Connolly while the band line up another song toward the end of a performance brimming with heavy guitars and feather-light hooks. “They’re ALL sad,” replies Sarah Corcoran, the group’s co-vocalist.

Pillow Queens don’t break any boundaries. Their oeuvre is traditional indie rock, where the loud bits build and build, and the sad bits collapse into dense eddies of melancholy. But they do it exceptionally well, their feverishly effervescent music rooted in their experiences as queer women in modern Ireland and glimmering with reflections of Tegan and Sara, Big Thief, and Boygenius.

The Boygenius connection runs especially deep. Pillow Queens have opened for that band’s vocalist, Phoebe Bridgers, while Boygenius producer Collin Pastore worked with them on the new long-player, Name Your Sorrow.

That project is a meditation on loss and grief informed in part by Connolly’s split from her long-term partner. It’s also an LP with a twist. Towards the end of the recording process, the quartet came across the “lost sonnet” Atlantis by late Killiney writer Eavan Boland, a piece they felt reflected the themes of the album. They were struck, in particular, by the poem’s assertion that one way to block the ache of grief is to live in the moment (Boland uses Atlantis as a metaphor for the loss of something that can never return).

The evening opens with a recording of Boland’s poem, followed by the gossamer chug of February 8th – a showcase for Connolly’s expressive singing, which lands somewhere between Boygenius’ Lucy Dacus and Alabama Shake’s Brittany Howard.

The band are visibly chuffed to be playing to a large and boisterous crowd. They return that enthusiasm with material which, amid the ennui, connects to their Dublin origins. A case in point is the beautiful shriek that is Donaghmede, a valentine which they dedicate to the various celebrities from the north Dublin suburb, including Damien Dempsey and half of B*Witched

The quintessential Pillow Queens tune delivers a pummelling melancholy via galumphing guitar and artful melodies. But they can be breezy and fun, too. Featuring a lead vocal from Corcoran, the zinging HowDoILook from their 2020 debut album, In Waiting, is one of several poppy highlights.

They bring it back around to Dublin for the encore, which they close with Liffey – a vivacious dirge that hits like Radiohead fronted by Florence and the Machine. Shrouded in dry ice, with night descending, they smile and take their leave – the biggest concert of their career having proved a triumph from start to finish.