Music World: Chilling In The Name Of

Jack Colleran’s first album is not, he insists, a break-up record. Sure, there WAS a break-up – one so bruising and disorientating that he left Dublin for Los Angeles to get his head together. But he didn’t set out to explicitly channel his heartache into music. He was caught up in the moment and it just happened.

Colleran (22) records as “Mmoths”, a suitably woozy moniker for his shoegaze-steeped electronica. He isn’t the most outgoing of musicians, with the stuttering manner of someone who’d rather not be centre of attention. But on Luneworks he frequently works miracles, with tracks that are by turns euphoric, ominous and transcendentally hypnotic.
“I don’t do this project for anyone but myself,” he says, a cliche which he actually sounds as if he means. “I don’t worry whether it is going to sell a lot of records. It’s a really selfish thing. I ‘m using it as a means of expression. It helps me get through things. I guess you could say it is semi-therapeutic.”
In so far as a My Bloody Valentine-influenced nu-gaze project can be said to, Mmoths fairly “exploded” onto the Irish music scene with a self-titled debut EP in 2012. Colleran was feted as the fresh new face of home-brewed electronica and featured in taste-maker blogs from Los Angeles to Tokyo (he recalls a hilarious interview with The Fader in which the journalist, having learned that Jack had done his “Leaving”, demanded to know where he was leaving for exactly).
Considering he had indeed just sat his Leaving Cert and was still living with his parents in Newbridge, Co Kildare, this was a lot to take in. Colleran didn’t feel overwhelmed exactly. However, he came to understand that he needed to step back, ignore the buzz, and focus on creating a body of work in which he could take pride. There comes a point when being the “next big thing” starts to get old.
“At the time it was weird,” he says of going straight from school into the music industry. “I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing. It was quite lonely – in the sense that I was doing this on my own and didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.
“Was it overwhelming? I guess it may have seemed overwhelming from the outside. When you are experiencing it, you see the highs and the lulls too. So in that sense it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as people might think. There are plenty of quiet days.”
He was going through a difficult break-up as he got to grips with Luneworks. Surrounded by reminders of the romance just sundered, he began to find Dublin claustrophobic. So he went to Los Angeles, crashing at the mid-city apartment of his manager, Jimmy Flemming.
“I didn’t leave the house that much,” he recalls. “When I have a lot of work to do my sleeping patterns go crazy. I’ll sleep during the day and stay up all night working. I’d see Jimmy in the morning and at night. When he was going to bed I’d be getting stuck in.”
He isn’t a fan of live music and would rather spend quality time with his headphones than venture into a beer-spattered club. Nonetheless, he has always understood that for Mmoths to work, he has to bring his art to the people. Here, he earned his spurs early on, playing support to Aphex Twin (“just that one gig”) and the xx.
“You learn a lot,” he nods. ”You have a specific amount of time to do your soundcheck. There are 20 people running around. If you’re not on time, you’re going to fuck up their thing. It teaches you discipline.”
Electronic artists – males in their 20s especially – are caricatured as introverts weeping into their laptops. And it’s true that Colleran is far from outgoing. But nor is he an outcast hiding in his parents’ basement.
“I wasn’t some lonely freak at school,” he laughs. “Sometimes you are portrayed in that way. You are labelled as this weird guy who makes music. There are all these stereotypes – some of which apply and some of which don’t.”

Luneworks is out now.