Villanelle are carving a grungy path to rock’n’roll, on their own terms

“It’s going incredible!” Gene Gallagher says, leaning back on a battered sofa in the label basement, hands behind his head, oversized Cobain-style sunglasses sliding down his nose. He laughs like someone who knows he can get away with it. Beside him, Ben Taylor fiddles with a guitar pick and Jack Schiavo scrolls through his phone. They all met in the summer of 2023, strangers who, in less than three years, have become a compact live unit.

The trio’s early singles have been unapologetically scuffed. The debut Hinge wears Nirvana on its sleeve, but there is more going on than imitation; there is a deliberate hunger for rawness, for guitar tones that bite and choruses that feel like they could topple a ceiling. Since landing on the NME 100, they have been touring non-stop, and the grind shows: callused hands, a collage of venues’ setlists taped to the road case, a growing cohort of fans who prefer moshing to moshpitting for the aesthetic.

When we speak in early April they have just come off the road supporting Miles Kane. “It was great, man,” Schiavo says. “We were playing the Academies and those kinds of places. It was great to be doing that and trying to collect some more fans as we hadn’t done a support slot for a while.” There are little tour anecdotes that feel more true than a press blurb: Gene was the sober one on antibiotics, while Ben and Jack drank for three.

That did not stop Gene from staying up all night. “He’d remember everything we’d been up to and we wouldn’t necessarily, so he’d always have something over us the next day,” Schiavo says. Taylor grins and adds that Gene becomes the band’s sleep paralysis demon. His vice is a Steam Deck and a game called Dave The Diver. “He’ll be making sushi at 3 a.m., fishing away,” Taylor says. “You can’t be going to bed when I’m fishing, bro,” Gene harrumphs, mock-offended.

The gaming silliness translates into a kind of affectionate embarrassment between them. At a Leeds show, Gene says he lost his mojo for a second when he saw someone in the crowd scrolling Instagram reels. “That is peak,” he admits. Taylor jokes that he would scroll reels on stage if it were physically possible. The image of a fan cutting up a tuna in the stalls while the band thrashes through a chorus is absurd and oddly specific; that absurdity is part of their live lore now.

Villanelle’s baptism by fire came in 2024 when Liam Gallagher invited them to open the anniversary run for Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. Those were their first shows, and they arrived at them raw. “If you’re about this life and you want to do it, then fucking do it, right?” Gene says of getting the call from his dad. Taylor remembers the tour as blissful ignorance: no tour manager, no techs, just three kids and a lot of noise. They learned the hard way how quickly a band can be reshaped by road miles.

They do not sit neatly in any indie scene. “We weren’t really from the Windmill talky art rock crowd,” Taylor says. Instead, they have tried to carve out something that feels like a niche of its own, playing uni venues, back-to-back nights at The Lexington and the kinds of bars where you can see the whites of people’s eyes. The “Punchbag” uni run last year meant more than a line on a resumé; it was a chance to see the reaction up close, to make a room move. “There are so many degrees of separation when you’re playing arenas,” Taylor says. “If they’re yawning, then you can’t really tell.” Up close, you can tell.

Their debut EP Measly Means, due May 6, reads like a high-kicking mixtape of influences: Smashing Pumpkins tremolo and chorus, Black Sabbath low end, a mid-90s palette of fuzz and melancholy. The title track stomps, paranoid and chugging; Squeeze pulls back to a scuzzy ballad that still has teeth. Opportunity finds Gene singing about “sitting facing backwards,” about getting your life in order—simple stakes, performed with a kind of bratty sincerity that is disarming.

There is a conversation they cannot avoid. Gene is a Gallagher by name and relation. The band says they have never hidden that fact. “People know who Gene is,” Taylor says. “We’re a band that own that and appreciate everything that’s coming from that, but we also work extremely hard at the same time.” The line is tidy but honest: they accept attention that arrives on the back of a famous surname and then try to justify it, night after night, in sticky venues and on the festival bill.

They are already writing their second EP and talking about an eventual album in the slow way that suggests patience rather than complacency. “I’m like a footballer,” Gene jokes. “I take it game by game.” The rhetoric is casual, but there is a method to it: keep touring, keep writing, make records that will still sound good in a smashed-up car years from now.

There is also a sense of small satisfactions. Gene says he has no urge to chase arena life again in the immediate term. “I was happy just to play The Lexington because I used to go there all the time,” he says, smiling. “That’s my one little box that’s been ticked now, so all this afterwards is just fine. I’ve officially made it, lads!” Whether he has or not depends on who you ask, but the room-level enthusiasm at their uni shows suggests they are doing the essential work: making fans who will follow, not just click.

Villanelle’s Measly Means EP is out May 6. The band will appear at The Great Escape on May 15. For a group that only met in 2023, their steady accumulation of gigs, stories, and bruised-neckline choruses looks less like instant fame and more like the slow, greasy work of building a scene.