Madra Salach: Ribbon Factory, louder and still a stepping stone

Madra Salach have been playing "Ribbon Factory" live for over a year. The Dublin sextet's first new song since January's debut EP is their liveliest. The tempo is up, the sentiment plain, and the delivery apologises for nothing.

They formed in 2023, when Paul Banks, Adam Cullen and Dara Duffy were playing pubs across Northside Dublin; Maxime Arnold, Jack Lawlor and Jack Martin later filled out the six-piece. Two singles, "Blue & Gold" and "I Was Just A Boy", landed in late 2025, and the EP It's a Hell of an Age followed in January 2026, topping the Irish independent albums chart and reaching number three on the overall Irish chart. The Pogues are the influence they have never shaken, and next June they support Fontaines DC at Slane.

They recorded it in New York with producer Loren Humphrey, whose recent credits include Geese and Cameron Winter. Banks calls it a stepping stone into more lively and punky arrangements. A year of playing it live shaped the take.

You can hear the year of shows in it. The arrangement pushes where the band's earlier material settled; the folk bones still show under the punk; the vocal carries the anger without announcing it. Uniquely Irish, as Banks puts it, and the song plays that way.

It is for the Pogues crowd and the Fontaines crowd, and for anyone who liked the EP's ideas more than its pace. It does not settle the argument the band are making about themselves: a stepping stone is provisional, and one song of four minutes and fourteen seconds can only promise.

So 3.5: good, and pointed somewhere worth following. The next one will show whether it goes further.

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