Dublin’s shoegaze upstarts Croíthe conjure a dark storm – a sound steeped in atmosphere yet startlingly assured for a band whose members are all still under twenty. Fronted by the magnetic Caodán Connolly, whose voice swings between bruised tenderness and defiance, the quartet – completed by guitarist Ben Byrne, bassist Frances Barron, and drummer Keevy McGowan – have fast become one of the capital’s most intriguing new exports. We spoke to the band fresh offstage at Sheffield’s Float Along Festival to speak about everything from forming through TikTok to the enduring pull of poetry.
Tonight is the first gig of your tour, on which you’re playing a few dates in Europe. Is that your first time?
Caodan: “Yeah – we’re playing Berlin the night before heading to Rotterdam for Left of the Dial, which we’re really excited about. We’ve got Paris and a few UK dates too, including a homecoming show, which will be special because we’ve been away for a while.”
How do you measure whether a show is a success for you?
Ben: “I think there are two sides to it. Straight after coming off stage, it’s all about how it felt – the sound, the energy, your own sense of it. But there’ve been plenty of times we’ve walked off thinking it was shite, then seen videos back and realised it was actually pretty good. You hear people talk about it afterwards and start to gauge it from there.”
Caodan: “It’s kind of a shared thing, you know? As soon as we finish a show, we just look at each other and feel it, feel the energy.”
You all met in primary school, right?
Ben: “Three of us did, but we met Keevy through a TikTok we put up looking for a drummer for tour. And then she commented and we had her up for an audition at my house. Within two months, we were playing our first gig.”
How do you think knowing each other for so long has shaped the band?
Caodan: “It’s a bit of a blessing and a curse, to be honest. We’ve known each other since we were about eight, so we know each other inside out. There’s this unspoken understanding – we can just look at each other on stage and know what to do, and that really feeds into the music. When Keevy joined, it just clicked straight away, like we’d known her forever.
We’ve grown up together, gone through secondary school, teenage years, all the same stuff, and that shared experience really comes through in what we write about. We can bounce off each other’s lives, and that’s made us tighter as a band. It wouldn’t work if someone else was in the mix.”
Ben: “I feel like it’s our biggest asset and our biggest fucking pain – we’re brutally honest with each other, and sometimes that causes friction. But I think if we didn’t fight, it’d be weird – it’d mean we didn’t care, you know. We have a passion for it.”
You must have been in quite a few different projects since meeting at school – when did you land on Croíthe, and was there a moment when you realised it was more than just another hobby?
Caodan: “We had a different name when we first released a couple singles, and it was copyrighted so we had our music taken down. We changed our name in like two days, I can’t really remember where it came from. I was just on the bus and I thought of it – I thought that we want to represent the Irish language, we can’t speak it perfectly but we all try.
But the moment we knew it was more than just a hobby was probably like our fourth gig when a booking agent came over from London, and within a couple of months we had an agency and we were playing shows in London for the Murder Capital and with So Young magazine. These are, like, things we grew up idolising.”
You’re all 19 or younger – do you see being so young as an advantage or a drawback?
Ben: “I love it, honestly. I like being younger than everyone else – people look at you a bit funny at first, and you can tell they’re thinking, “God, you’re so young.” But then you get up there, play, and it feels amazing.”
Caodan: “In a way, it feels like we’ve got a bit of a leg up — not in a cocky way, but just because we’ve been really lucky with how fast things have grown. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to be a bit older — we were still in school when we started all this — but it happened when it was meant to.
I like to think we’ve got a bit of a head start. Most of the bands we play with are in their mid-to-late 20s, and they’ve already been through loads of projects. So if we’re sharing stages with them now, at our age, we must be doing something right.”
It’s been just over a year since you released your debut single, The Kiss. How do you think the band has developed since then?
Caodan: “More guitar pedals. But mainly more experience. We’ve been through so many different stages – we started gigging at the end of July last year, and by January we were playing in London, so it all happened pretty fast.
When I listen back to The Kiss now, I kind of wince a bit – it feels like such a specific moment in time. I don’t regret releasing it though; it got us noticed by So Young and opened a lot of doors for us. It’s been a bit of a butterfly effect ever since.
I think we’ve really grown as songwriters and lyricists, and we’ve started to develop our own sound. With the first couple of singles, we definitely wore our influences on our sleeve – and that’s fine. A lot of bands try to hide that, but we’ve never seen any shame in it, but now I think we’re more in tune with what we want to sound like, and with each other as musicians.”
The Kiss was originally a poem you wrote…
Caodan: “Yeah it started as a poem in November 2023, around the time of the riots in Dublin. It was the far right, and it was horrific to witness. We were actually out at a school play that night and had to evacuate – there were helicopters everywhere.
That period, between 17 and 18, was when we’d just started going out, discovering nightlife, that rush of being young and free for the first time. The Kiss came from that feeling – a kind of short, fleeting buzz, like a one-day love. But seeing what was happening in the city made me realise how precious and fragile things are.
We tapped into that same idea later with The Lovers – using romance or art as a way to escape a grim reality. That night inspired a few songs, actually – Say Goodbye to the Underworld came out of it too.”
Ben: “I remember Caodan playing the bassline for The Kiss to me in school about six or seven months before we released it. When we were about to play our first gig, we realised we needed an opener, and that’s when everything just clicked. We had it written in about an hour. It wasn’t great at first, but it got there.”
It was a poem – does literature influence your music much?
Caodan: “Yeah, definitely. It’s what really inspired me to start writing. I’ve played guitar since I was about ten, but when I was around fourteen, I got properly into literature. At school we were studying Yeats and Robert Frost, and I started buying their collections, reading them over and over. I began writing poems for class assignments and just fell in love with it – I stuck with it.
Over the last few years, I’ve realised I’ve got a real connection to it. Poetry feels like the purest form of expression – it feeds into everything else. I think it complements our music perfectly.”
I read an interview from earlier this year where you mentioned being in talks with record labels – have you signed with one yet?
Caodan: “We were a bit stupid when we said that – it’s not like we were about to sign a record deal and become millionaires overnight. We have had a few offers, but nothing we’ve taken yet. We realised pretty quickly that it’s not as simple as it sounds. Right now, we’re releasing our EP independently at the end of October on vinyl and CD because we wanted to see what we could achieve on our own, organically, without a label or paid press. It’s been important to us to build things from the ground up and really find our footing before committing to anything too early.”
Where do you see Croíthe a year from now? What would you like to have achieved?
Caodan: “Number one album – well, number one EP. I’d love to see the EP hit number one, then start thinking about an album next year. Hopefully we’ll be on a proper headline tour, playing some festivals too. I just want to keep doing this, you know?”
Words: Donovan Livesey