By Aditi Hrisheekesh, Deputy Music Editor
What does it mean to constantly crave the feeling for what once was? There’s a strange ache in remembering somewhere you once called home. Homesickness, except sometimes you can’t fully define what exactly you miss. NewDad makes you feel this presence of absence, of change, in all its bittersweet heaviness – all-encompassing and still entirely untouchable, yet strangely comforting all at once.
They encapsulate a sheer magnetism of absolute longing, what it is to yearn, what it is to hold back, and what it is to give yourself so entirely to someone. Frontwoman Julie Dawson questions, ‘Is everyone sufficiently sad?’, laying the groundwork for a repertoire of the most plaintive of songs honed in dreamy melodies.
The tour is coming soon after the release of their most recent album, Altar, in September 2025; a shoegaze-y work of art shaped by dislocation and transition. It’s a named ‘love-letter’ to the band’s hometown, Galway, where they formed in 2018, and the displacing strangeness of carrying the remnants of the past when moving somewhere entirely new.
With a soundscape that merges distortion and vulnerability, carrying an amalgamation of musical influences that create a unique sound, the band successfully showcases this push-and-pull between what once was and what will become.
This sense of nostalgia is immensely vivid live, especially with the uncertainty of new beginnings – something that's highly relatable (the impending dread of post-graduation looms upon me). Muted waves of visuals are coasted along the screen, feeling like a distant coastline, adding to this sense of homesickness that runs deep within their lyricism – they begin with ‘Other Side’ from Altar, a song that encapsulates this feeling of memory and present experience being out of sync; ‘fear of a change but this place won’t let me go’.
Being in my last year of university, that sense of uncertainty and fear of change is definitely widespread. But also, it encapsulates the freshers’ experience, with many moving from all over the country and world to a completely new environment – that feeling of being thrown straight into the deep end and settling into your new normal. It’s bittersweet, and the dreamy yet heavy guitar washes and utter vulnerability in Dawson’s vocals embody this, allowing us to exist in those spaces in between.
Their setlist ranges across their catalogue, from their debut Madra, released in early 2024, with songs of co-dependency and destructiveness in relationships. Songs like ‘Angel’ and ‘Sickly Sweet’ showcase an emotional asymmetry within relationships and in love – what does it mean to love in a way that unsettles you?
‘Angel’ encapsulates putting a partner on a pedestal, epitomising instability and those feelings of inadequacy within romance — ‘you can swim around, but I don’t want you to drown inside me, it’s not fair to be your responsibility’ — a song that was inspired by the dynamic between Rue and Jules in HBO’s Euphoria. The coastline visuals on the screen and that sense of bittersweet homesickness add to this almost comforting sense of turbulence.
They’re genre-bending in the soundscape, inspirations coming from an amalgamation of musical territories. Being influenced by a range of bands, they have a lineage that can be traced with bleached, plaintive tones that recall the softer edges of The Cure, a band they’ve named as one of their big influences, and Robert Smith himself has expressed admiration.
They graft certain influences into contemporary times, carrying that intimacy of bedroom-pop and simultaneously extrapolating into the sweeping soundscape of dream-pop and heavy shoegaze that is reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine. Seeing this gut-wrenching vulnerability live carried that Robert Smith-esque raw sense of longing that translates from lyrics to vocals.
Stringing together the disquiet of leaving places with the emotional vulnerability of songs, the set was inexplicably sad. Intimacy was played against such a dreamscape of distortion and melancholy, meaning that, whilst watching them, the sound is so incredibly packed with feeling, even if you don’t know the lyrics. The lyrics spill outwards and become the sensation of it all.
Featured Image: Epigram / Aditi HrisheekeshDo you enjoy nostalgic sets?
