PILLOW QUEENS PUT ON A SHOW WITH UNBRIDLED PERSONALITY
Walking into The Dome at Tufnell Park, the energy feels as intimate as going into your local pub. That’s the joy of Pillow Queens - their shows are as much about having fun as they are about playing music.
Image Credit: Rich Gilligan
The night’s opening set comes from ARXX - a lovable Brighton duo and the first guests featured on the VOCAL GIRLS podcast - who are supporting Pillow Queens ahead of their own show with Rock Against Violence at The Oslo this month. The set is a glorious run through their singles, interspersed with tour bus anecdotes and a contagious warmth.
When Pillow Queens, a quartet hailing from Dublin, take to the stage it’s with ‘Holy Show’, a charming indie-rock slow burn that sees them agonising over past words and actions. Frontwoman Pamela shows off her gorgeous vocals from the off, complimented by the rest of her bandmates. They may have only started gigging again in the last two months, but their cohesion as a group clearly hasn’t missed a beat.
Given the daunting return to live performances, Sarah does admit that they’ve “prepared some banter” for tonight’s show - something that comes in handy when a stubbornly uncooperative amp briefly renders them a three-piece. Grinning, Sarah tells us cheerfully about the stowaway worm in their tour van, and how their week was made when Phoebe Bridgers liked one of their tweets.
With the return of the amp, the set then moves through the rest of their debut album, ‘In Waiting’, which came out in September 2020. The single ‘Handsome Wife’ had been released a few months earlier, with a music video that had to be scaled back to fit the constraints of the pandemic. Tonight, it feels like a full-circle moment to hear it being played in a room where people can finally touch again.
‘Gay Girls’, another one of their singles, gets a similarly massive response. In 2020 it was included on the soundtrack for Amazon Prime’s ‘Dating Amber’, a wonderfully charming comedy set in Ireland which starred Lola Petticrew and Fionn O’Shea.
The beauty of Pillow Queens is their range; gentler tracks like ‘Harvey’ and ‘Brothers’ are interspersed with the rockier bite of ‘A Dog’s Life’ and ‘HowDoILook’, the whole thing laced together by Pamela and Sarah’s vocals, and by lyrics that stay true to their reflections on ordinary life. As a live show, all of this is delivered with an endearing warmth, and the love from the crowd is obvious.
In a momentary departure from their album, ‘Rats’ also makes the lineup - a song from their 2016 EP, ‘Calm Girls’, that was re-released in September to celebrate their signing with Royal Mountain Records. Several unreleased songs from their upcoming album are also introduced; Pamela jokingly asks the crowd to keep any notes to themselves, given that the record’s already gone to press.
As ‘Liffey’ plays us out, the infectious hook builds into a thunderstorm that crashes into the anthemic chorus. “God, give me glory,” Pamela sings, “or don’t / I’ll take my lot.” This is one of the band’s darkest songs in terms of lyrics, but sonically it’s where they shine. And with their second album around the corner, tonight’s triumph proves that there will be more glory coming their way.
