Since forming in 2010, No Matter have remained a beacon of hope and inspiration to those in this country who want to make music on their own terms. Proudly DIY, they have played Slovenian festivals, toured the UK and Canada and released quite a few killer records. Their releases, consistency and work ethic should be studied by every new and upcoming NI band.
So, to celebrate 15 years, I got in touch with No Matter and asked them a few questions.
Dan and Cat had obviously been in the Dangerfields, Cat did the artwork for Leap for Lenin (Jamie’s former band) so you guys have clearly known each other for a number of years previously. When did the idea for No Matter begin and what was the impetus?
Dan: I guess around that time there were no bands around playing the kind of punk stuff we were interested in so we figured we might as well give it a shot. This was around the tail end of 2010, I think.
Cat: Northern Ireland’s pop punk scene has always been fairly small so it was pretty inevitable we’d all encounter each other quickly enough! Like you said I was in the Dangerfields when Dan joined them but I was also in school with Simsie (also known for DFs) and my first band was with him, he was then in Numskull with Jamie and a friend of ours called John. John was in Leap for Lenin with Jamie and on bass was Gray. I was also in a band with Gray for a while called Lando… there’s way more connections than that but as you can see all those bands back then were linked in some way or another – if not multiple ways!
As for No Matter, I think it was Dan and Jamie’s idea for starting a new band from vague memory. A lineup with the 3 of us hadn’t existed out of all the previous incarnations of bands. And it sounded fun to me so I was up for it, though it was probably more because I happened to be around when it was being discussed, so I became the other member!!
Whenever No Matter formed, the three initial members were “veterans” (to put it politely) of the NI punk scene. What did you want to do differently with No Matter than you had with your other bands?
Cat: I was just happy to be playing music again!
Dan: We never really set out to do anything “differently”, we just wanted to play gigs and have a laugh. Still do!
Tell us about writing and recording the first demo.
Cat: I think writing was all Dan’s doing at that stage! Certainly I didn’t have any old horrors written by then so it was all Dan’s songs that got recorded for the demo, which I’m very glad of!
Dan: We narrowed our paltry (and mostly cringeworthy) material down to three tracks as we only had a day in the studio. Cat got sick so she didn’t have much fun recording it. We decided we needed songs recorded before we did our first gig, ’cause usually with previous bands we’d have gigged a lot first but we wanted CDs to stick in people’s hands from the get go. I still think Cheapshot’s alright, but sadly I don’t think very much of the first couple of recordings. That said, the demo got a bit of positive feedback on Fastfude… which for those of you who don’t know, was what we had in yore in lieu of social media.
Within a short space of time, No Matter had Headlined a show in London and then the Fidge EP came out. At the time, I thought that the production stifled the great songs and, not long after it came out, the band went on a brief hiatus. In retrospect, do you rate Fidge?
Cat: We rushed the whole thing as we had some newer tracks we liked, had an Irish tour coming up, and so aimed to get a release out for it. We did it in a weekend and pumped the CDs out for said tour, which at the time didn’t seem that mad an idea as we’d had previous bands do such things, but I think it definitely shows. It’s a shame as some of the songs were used on our set for years to come and it’s odd to look back at cos I remember a lot of funny routines and good times around it but I think we all consider it our least liked release.
We kind of went full steam with trying to get ourselves out there as a touring band. With all of us having been in touring bands before it just felt like a totally natural thing to do as far as just generally gigging, but rushing over to England in retrospect was too soon. I know I was still trying to escape the nervous awkward mode I still hadn’t outgrown, which would come back full force on stage for a start and then with a release we weren’t overly happy with it just had left us all deflated for a while! But we did meet our mates from our future label Umlaut Records at that London gig so it all worked out in the long run!
Dan: Thanks for saying the songs were great, first of all! But yeah when that first mix landed in our inbox a few days after leaving the studio we weren’t exactly happy with it. We attempted a remix, but there’s only so much you can do, and the final result was just underwhelming. I still like some of the tracks (Hateful stuck around in the set for years, and Retch got re-done for the debut full length) but I don’t rate it very highly overall. It’s not available on Spotify, make of that what you will. When we recorded it, we crashed for the night in the guest rooms above a bar in Cookstown, and Jarlath came down to hang out. Little did he know he’d be in the band a few years later!
It was around this time that you debuted a few guitar players (Marc and Simsie) before going for Jarlath. Why bring in an extra member at this late stage?
Dan: Up to that point our songs had been 3 chord punk style stuff. Around this time we were starting to write more riff-based material and a second guitar would have made things sounding less empty live. Markus joined and after a while was replaced by Sims, who did a UK tour and recorded Drop the Act with us. Jarlath replaced Sims and has been with us since, the big legend.
Jarlath, tell us how you discovered No Matter and how you ended up joining the band.
Jarlath: I’m the youngest in the band by about 5 years so when I was getting into punk rock in my early teens I was naturally curious to check out some local bands. A brief Google search introduced me to a certain Belfast band called The Dangerfields who Dan played guitar for at the time. It was 2005 and they had just released the ‘Born to Rock’ album and I loved it. Still do!
As I got a little older, I crossed paths with Dan a few times on nights out around Belfast and then my old band played a handful of gigs with No Matter in the early days. Dan then asked me if I would be interested in joining the band in December 2014 and now, 10 years later, here we are!
Drop the Act came out in 2014 and, for me, is the first genuinely brilliant No Matter recording. The songs are excellent, the production is beefy, and the playing hits the spot. When recording it, did you think you were onto something?
Dan: Thanks! I’m not sure if I’d say ‘we thought we were onto something’, that’s all a bit VH1 Behind the Music, haha. I’d definitely say it was around this point that we began to take things a bit more seriously, though, and I consider this time to be the true start of the band. An amusing anecdote about Drop the Act: when we received the CDs, we played one… and due to some error at the pressing plant, every single copy had the wrong music on it. It was some British rapper, rapping about being a “horny rhino”. They had to be sent back and re-pressed. I’ve since tried to hunt that horny rhino song down online but have so far been unsuccessful.
2016 saw the release of ‘Ill-Advised’. At the time, I wrote that “…it pales somewhat in comparison to 2014’s ‘Drop the Act’ EP, which featured a much heavier (and satisfying) guitar tone and a much more concise feel to the running order. This is because there is a bit of filler in the running order…There’s nothing inherently wrong with the…songs, just that the standards throughout the rest of the album are quite high and these songs don’t hit the mark the way they should” and I would still think this. What are your memories of recording the LP?
Cat: It must be our marmite record! It was recorded at the same studio as Drop the Act and I remember us all being happy with it at the time. We were trying to create more of an album as opposed to just x amount of songs on a release like before, so we deliberately were experimenting with new ideas and approaches.
We definitely found it was this recording that started us getting more attention than before, plus more so from outside the UK. Like the title track Migraine was picked for an Apple Music playlist and has over 80k plays there and one of the editors of US based punk site Punknews described it at the time as his “favourite pop-punk album of the last twenty-five years” – which totally blew us away! But I guess that’s what makes music interesting. There are bands I like that have songs/albums I consider weak, but for others it’s their favourite stuff of theirs! Big lesson in general I guess is that you can never please everyone, no matter how hard you try – and that applies to all areas of life!
Would there be changes we’d make to the record now? Absolutely. But we’re all pretty self-critical so i think we’d say that about every release if money was no issue haha!!
You gave us Drop the Act in 2019, and I immediately loved it, with ‘Rewrite’ being a particular favourite as it sounded like Motorhead gone pop punk. What’s your take on this release?
Dan: Some reviews call Excess Baggage an album and some have called it an EP so in hindsight I somewhat wish we’d have made it either shorter or longer to make that a bit clearer! I’d personally call it an EP though. This period was a really fun time for us because we played Canada for the first time and did a European tour after the release which I have really fond memories of. Then covid clanged down!
And in that period, you released Me vs Myself, which is a bit of a lost classic. Was that originally meant for Excess Baggage?
Cat: It was written for a charity compilation released in Nov 2020 by Colins Punk Rock World called To the Front with bands like Mobina Galore, The Tuts, Catbite etc. The digital comp was themed around amplifying the voices of bands which feature POC, LGBTQ+, female and non-binary members to raise money for Imkaan. But I then also made a retro game styled animated video for the tune to accompany its release (cue several all-nighters trying to get it finished!) which I think helped it stay somewhat known in our catalogue! It was a similar scenario for our 30 second charity song If I Ruled the World (I’d Ban Everyone From Writing Songs About What They’d Do If They Ruled The World) which on a side note is possibly my favourite title of any of our songs given its the longest name we have, whilst also for our shortest song.
2022 saw the release of Bad Chemistry, a step up in terms of production but “It’s much more than a pop-punk album, it’s an LP urging us to have fun in the face of a collapsing 21st century consensus.” Did the pandemic have an influence on lyrics and direction of music?
Dan: Maybe musically, as we obviously had a lot more time on our hands, so we could work on arrangements more than we might have before. But lyrically, no, not really. One of the demos even got nixed because it was about being a shut in and we didn’t really want any lockdown/covid related stuff on there… maybe it’ll resurface on a release down the line!
The artwork has always helped No Matter stand out from the masses. From the eye catchingly simple logo, down to
– Drop The Act hinting at melancholia and fear of the unknown before a glance at the back cover gives away the secret behind the title. As a result, the cover becomes a cruel joke.
– Ill Advised being suitably bizarre, moody, funny and evocative with the use of two colours blurring together to ensure no definitive divide between the two gives the feeling of an uncertain, suffocating future. And even the look on the dog’s face on each side reflects this.
– For Excess Baggage I love the griminess of the wall and the bulging suitcase (with a picked at No Matter sticker). You can envisage four band members sharing a room while trying to avoid the cockroaches in the corner! The back is a situation that anyone who has played gigs will be able to sympathise with straight away. The thumbs up is a magic touch, carrying on in the face of adversity.
– By contrast, Bad Chemistry seems like an inversion of Ill-Advised, as if the cat is retaliating for the damage done by the dog, thus giving it a more foreboding tone.
Tell us about your history with art and why these covers are so important for the records.
Cat: History wise, I studied graphic design years ago which has been a very handy addition for the band. So as a result I do about 90% of our artwork!
I’ll show them my latest creation (animals tend to feature a lot in my artwork!) or show them what their suggestions have produced and if they all like it – it gets the sign off! And then it’s fingers crossed that if we all like it, others will too! Like our dog and crossbones logo definitely seems to have been a hit over the years thankfully! (Even to the point it was stolen by another band – not so thankfully!!)
We do like to add things too that make us not seem so serious, like the thumbs up in Excess Baggage you spoke of or little nods like Bad Religion’s Suffer boy hidden on the back of Ill Advised.
The only stuff so far that hasn’t been made by me was the Drop the Act cover and accompanying T-shirt, and the mad cat T-shirt design to accompany our latest album. They were designed by Mark Bell who is not only a brilliant artist but a really dead on guy too! We highly recommend checking out his stuff! The cover for our split with the Kimberly Steaks was also drawn by their long time collaborator Wolf Mask – whose distinctive style is also class! You should definitely check him out too while you’re at it!
Cat, when going through Bandcamp, I noticed that songs where you sing lead don’t have an option to read the lyrics. It got me thinking about how a lot of your songs are focused on hypocrites and holding people to standards set by themselves. What is it that fascinates you about this area?
Cat: I’ve definitely always found it easier to write songs that aren’t happy-go-lucky type ones. I’d like to – the idea of some party summer song has always been appealing to me (we play pop punk after all!) but I’ve so far found any I’ve written like that to be too cheesy to see the light of day!
I think I end up talking about cheaters, hypocrites, people disrespecting each other etc. as it’s a pet peeve of mine and other times it’s based on recent events, for example, Unsaid. That took me a long time as it was for two friends that had died way too young and I wanted others to be able to relate to it too. Maybe I’ll write a song I don’t find to be pure cheese for the next recording!!
And alas there’s no deep meaning to me not sharing my lyrics – just laziness haha! I just had never got round to putting them up online on the earlier tracks!
Likewise Dan, a lot of your lyrics straddle a line between bleak and humourous. I particularly love “Raking through the embers of the past/To find the answer to a question that I’m too afraid to ask/Disregard, and keep your chin up high/Bass, guitar and drums will help me kiss it all goodbye” as it captures the feeling of losing yourself in music while knowing all too well that it’s only temporary. Why do you find yourself exploring these areas, lyrically speaking.
Dan: I suppose they’re themes I find it easiest to write about. To me, writing lyrics is still very much a work in progress and I’m always looking for ways to improve, at least in terms of themes and subjects’ etcetera. It’s important to me to inject a bit of humour throughout as well. For instance, on Ad Nauseam off our latest 7″, the last line complains about people repeating themselves, then that line’s repeated 7 times. A career in comedy awaits, clearly.
Jarlath, what process do you have for writing songs, and have you considered using Little Sausage Disorder/Nerdmore songs for No Matter?
Jarlath: Every band I have ever been in has had a different songwriting process. When I was in LSD (note: in, not on haha!) we were all very young and lived very close to each other, so we would practice maybe 3 or 4 nights a week sometimes and all write songs together.
When it came to Nerdmore, that was just me writing and recording songs on my own in my bedroom as a way to get a bit of practice when it comes to recording and doing demos. By the time LSD split up, I had enough songs for a Nerdmore setlist, so me and a few of the lads from LSD switched the line up around a little bit and started playing those songs live.
With No Matter, it’s a bit of both really. We write and record our own demos at home and then work on them together in the practice room. I think this works best because we get a chance to familiarise ourselves with each other’s ideas before finishing them off in the same room together.
When it comes to using LSD or Nerdmore tracks for No Matter, I would be happy enough if we had a go at an old Nerdmore track or two sometime, but when it comes to the LSD tunes, they were all written collectively between the 4 of us, so I just think it wouldn’t feel right playing them with No Matter.
Looking back over 15 years, how do you think the NI music has changed (for better and worse) over that time and do you consider yourselves to be an international act as opposed to a local act?
Dan: We’re more of an “anywhere that’ll take us” act… we’ve never really been an ‘in with the in crowd’ band so to speak, it’s a niche genre after all haha!
So in saying that we haven’t seen too much of the changes (good or bad), other than venues we loved closing and other places then trying to fill their shoes. Although locally we have got a fair bit of airplay on ATL which was cool of them and a lot of the older punk crowd have treated us well, like the Time to be Proud crew.
So, 15 years on, how do you view the journey that No Matter have been on and would you do things differently?
Cat: Almost like one of our tours haha! Like there’s always going to be low points (like sitting in traffic jams when already on tight schedules, sleep going out the window, expensive ferries, plans falling through, or total woes like a guitar getting smashed one date into a week-long tour) but there’s also a lot of good memories and fun times. There’s definitely a reason we’re yet to bail!
We’ve met people and travelled to places that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, plus got to support bands we considered influences when we were younger as well as played with upcoming acts that deserve to be as big! For me the band is like a wee family, as cheesy as that sounds!! And its always cool to find out that people around the world are listening to our stuff and checking us out!
Differently… I just wish we had had more time and funds! They’re the main issues we’ve always had – but I think it’s that case for all areas of life in general for nearly everyone!
Top 5 memorable gigs?
Cat: We all of course have varying personal favourites, but I think all of us consider these some of our most memorable!
The Flatliners, Cologne, Germany. (We were the only other band playing that night so it was a full house and better still – they were all great people!)
Punk Rock Holiday Fest, Slovenia (the 2nd time we played! First time was great too, but we’d definitely grown as a band by the time we came back!)
Manchester Punk Fest, England. (Awesome fest. We’d never played Manchester before so didn’t know how it’d go but the place was packed, and we were more than welcomed here!)
Pouzza Fest, Montreal, Canada (also the 2nd time we played it! Canada is such a class place and the team behind Pouzza have gone above and beyond for us each time we’ve played – plus we got to play New York City afterwards on this tour which was another big milestone for us!)
A disused tram, Bratislava, Slovakia. (One of those shows that stood out for so many reasons haha! It was on one of our best Euro tours so far, was a venue location I’m sure we’ll never encounter again – the windows even started falling out during the band on before us! – and we’ve a lot of funny memories from that night!)
What’s next for No Matter?
Dan: Demos are currently being worked on so it would be nice to get another LP out at some point. There isn’t any real pressure as we’ve being doing this for a while… it’s not like we’re going to be “discovered” or whatever, so the priority for myself anyway is to try and write strong material and get another record out there!
