Having started out in their secondary school days in Mayo, Ireland, with Kyle Thornton on guitar and his mate Adam on drums, Nerves are now on the brink of a second EP that sees them pushing their eclectic, quaking noise-rock sound even further.
“We were quite obviously going to end up forming a band,” Kyle recalls. “It was kind of inevitable.” However, the path they took was far from typical.
“In fifth year, some woman who was working in our school – she ran a local music festival thing at the end of the summer – came up and was like, ‘do you wanna play this thing at the end of the summer?’ I was like, yeah, absolutely, but we had no songs or anything, and we didn’t have a bassist! So, I came up to Adam at lunchtime and I was like, ‘hey man, we have a gig at the end of the summer’ and he was like, ‘we have a band?!’”
Little did she know, this woman had just set into motion one of the most exciting rock bands in Ireland, and they are showing no signs of slowing down, with their second EP Iarmhaireacht arriving 15 August.
To an eye unattuned to the Irish language, Iarmhaireacht might just look like a string of letters, but Kyle pronounces it with the seamless, poetic air of someone who’s lived it. “One of the translations is, ‘the loneliness one feels at dawn,’ but as a word that you can use in sentences it can also mean declining or to be going backwards,” he tells me.
“I felt like it suited what we were doing on the EP because it’s all about mental health and grief and substance abuse and has this screaming into the void, lonely kind of quality to it,” he continues. It is indeed a fitting title, but Nerves’ ambitions don’t end there, as they are a band with the scope to look outside of just themselves when it comes to these issues through their use of striking samples.
“With all the samples that we use, stuff usually specifically about the reoccurring issues that crop up in Ireland and particularly in rural Ireland that are contributing factors to mental health and substance abuse et cetera, et cetera,” Kyle explains. “The samples are how I weave a broader political narrative into it as people from rural Ireland,” he continues.
Those samples, sourced from CR’s Video Vaults and Raidió Teilifís Éireann, were picked for their continuing relevance, even today. “The sample that we have before ‘Don’t Let Go’ talking about the problems rural communities were facing in the 1950s, that is pretty much exactly what’s going on in 2025. It feels like we haven’t really made as much progression as a society in rural Ireland as we would like,” Kyle says.
All of this serves to elevate a project that could have come across as just a raw outpouring of noise into a cathartic study of people, place, and time’s passage. The responsibility of capturing all of that in the studio fell to their producer, Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, who Kyle speaks highly of.
“Dan is a real Steve Albini type. He’s very focused on being an engineer and getting the best raw sounds that he can get out of a band,” Kyle explains. “He’s just an incredible engineer and an incredible mixer.”
Beyond what they put on record, Nerves have built themselves a reputation for their uncompromising live shows, of which Kyle has many good memories, including their most recent trip to Europe, playing as part of Left of the Dial in Rotterdam. “I think it was 300 or 400 capacity, but it was rammed by the time you started and there was a bunch of people that we spotted that we recognized from the other shows that we played the last couple of days.”
“It was one of the most fun gigs I’ve been to purely just to be able to be playing your thing and look into the crowd and see the carnage, and then just look over at the other lads in the band, and just kind of laugh at the fact that this is even happening!”
For Kyle, making music is all about having fun. Whether it’s hilarious studio sessions or triumphant moments on stage, there’s a core of joy to everything he says to me, despite describing the music as “fucking bleak!” It comes through most in what he describes as the main takeaway from the EP.
“If you’re in a bit of a hole or in a bit of a bad place, you can always turn it around. It very much will not be easy, but everyone holds it inside them to be able to do that, because I didn’t think I could for a long time and then, I’m in a much better position in my life now than I was when I was writing these songs.”
What’s on the horizon? A whole lot of UK and Irish touring, a return to Europe, and beginning the “big scary A word” – their debut album. If Iarmhaireacht proves anything, it’s that they’re ready to face that challenge head-on, no matter how “fucking bleak” the world gets.
Listen to Iarmhaireacht by Nerves when it comes out on 15 August 2025.
