{"title":"Girls Names","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"arms-around-a-vision","title":"Arms Around A Vision","description":"\u003cp\u003eNorthern Ireland's Girls Names return with their third full-length album, 'Arms Around a Vision'. On 'Arms Around a Vision', they're more widescreen than ever but also more direct and aggressive. The bass, drums and guitars are still there, but so are saxophones, organs, detuned broken guitars and pianos, and even sheets of metal assaulted with hammers. Conceptually, 'Arms Around a Vision' acts as a love letter to European elegance - Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, Germany's Zero Group and both Neubauten and Bowie's Berlin. Love and pain, romance and fucking. It's all in there somewhere. Grand claims, perhaps, but in an ever bleak world, why not skygaze? The album opens with 'Reticence', a song in two parts that's half metallic knockout, half midnight swagger. It sounds unlike anything they've ever done before, and is a perfect primer for an album that treads a course between Eno-era Roxy sleaze, Birthday Party dissonance and M.E.S' three R's: repetition, repetition, repetition. For fans of The Horrors, These New Puritans, The Cure, Savages, Deerhunter, Toy, Ice Age, Fire Engines, Wire etc. LP - Black Vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve with Download.LP+ - Limited Cream Coloured vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve with Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tough Love","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50493081944395,"sku":"390335","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50493083648331,"sku":"390334","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/6ef37e1d-1ffc-4e2d-aec6-2b56ad5d6505_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727695447"},{"product_id":"primitive-desire","title":"Primitive Desire","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis is a Record Store Day 2018 item. It will be available to purchase from our stores from 8am 21st April. Remaining stock will be available to purchase from this page at 00.01 28th April.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ePrimitive Desire\u003c\/i\u003e is an 11-track collection of the first ever studio sessions by Girls Names, recorded in 2009 in Belfast. It compiles their debut EP originally released on Captured Tracks, the eight songs that originally featured on the long-out-of print \u003ci\u003eYou Should Know By Now\u003c\/i\u003e mini-EP released on Tough Love, and a hereto-unreleased bonus track. \u003ci\u003ePrimitive Desire\u003c\/i\u003e is exactly as labeled and provides fans with a document of the band's early years as a two-piece, fuelled by a distinct nervous energy and nascent dark edge that would manifest itself much more obviously on subsequent albums. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - Limited edition Green Vinyl (1000 copies) and Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tough Love","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50497783267659,"sku":"1030543","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d323ed64-e490-4826-b71c-d73b92742518_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727732625"},{"product_id":"stains-on-silence","title":"Stains on Silence","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, \u003ci\u003eStains on Silence \u003c\/i\u003eby Girls Names is one such release. Following 2015’s blitzing \u003ci\u003eArms Around a Vision\u003c\/i\u003e, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted – mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled out from the stress of rushing the record and not being happy with it, as well as being skint with no impending touring on the cards and constantly having to worry about rent.” The stumbling blocks that proved a strain became the album’s defining breakthrough. Recorded in various locations including Belfast’s Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley, Cully’s home and the band’s practice space, spontaneous creation, cut-up techniques and self-editing took centre-stage for the first time. \"We started tearing the material apart and rebuilding, re-editing and re-recording different parts in my home in early Autumn last year,” says Cully. “When we got them to a place we were happier with we went back into Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley to finalise the mixes to what they are now.\" Where AAAV proved a brazen statement of intent, \u003ci\u003eStains on Silence\u003c\/i\u003e bounds forth as its feature-length comedown. What could have seen the band buckle became an opportunity for approaching things tabula rasa. During its two-year transmutation, Cully, bassist Claire Miskimmin and guitarist Philip Quinn had a single aim for their fourth album: to make an old-fashioned record clocking in around 30 to 35 minutes in length that made the listener reach straight for repeat. From the Bang Bang bar-summoning swoon of opener \u003ci\u003e25\u003c\/i\u003e and the submerged disco doom of \u003ci\u003eHaus Proud\u003c\/i\u003e to the rapt, dub-leaning \u003ci\u003eFragments of a Portrait\u003c\/i\u003e, Girls Names have excelled in their goal by forging an LP of synchronous nuance and defiance. Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire (\"I want to bathe again, I want to swim again \/ In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold.\" — \u003ci\u003e25\u003c\/i\u003e). But while \u003ci\u003eStains on Silence\u003c\/i\u003e came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it’s both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn’t be more assured. For fans of The Cure, Iceage, Wire, HTRK, These New Puritans, The Fall, Berlin-era Bowie \/ Iggy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - Black Vinyl in Cream Sleeve.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP+ - Limited to 300 Copies. Orange Vinyl in Black Sleeve.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tough Love","offers":[{"title":"LP.","offer_id":50497802830155,"sku":"1033864","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50497802273099,"sku":"1033859","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50497802666315,"sku":"1033865","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/3bd9d44a-e9b9-451e-8c73-d8e9845b071b_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727733115"},{"product_id":"the-new-life-extra-tracks","title":"The New Life - Extra Tracks","description":"\u003cp\u003eRe-released with six extra tracks. Belfast-based four-piece girls names return with a bleak and brilliant adventure into doom-laden goth pop. The album's title track, and the first single to be taken from the album, is an ideal entry point. Just shy of 8 minutes long, it rotates around a hypnotic bass line, and in cully's evocation of renaissance, offers a perfect metaphor for the album as a whole. 'Hypnotic regression' reflects another side to the record. The reverb-heavy guitars and compelling melody are immediately memorable, but there are signs of experimentation, too; the white squall of the lead break; the uneasiness in the vocal echoes that furnish the verses.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tough Love","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50997535244619,"sku":"368987","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/dbeab28c-224c-46fc-8ab9-2b64231939fb_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1734762494"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/girls-names.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}