One of the hottest new indie quartets out of Dublin are KARMS, made up of brothers Stephen and Colm O’Loughlin with friends Danny Farrelly and Jay Maleney. “I’ve been playing music with Colm since I picked up a guitar,” says frontman Stephen. “People ask what’s it like working with your brother, and I don’t know – we’ve been doing it forever! Danny, meanwhile, was my best friend growing up. We were on the same football team, and we’re related in that Irish way, some kind of cousins-removed. The band evolved from just having fun with our friends.”
KARMS recently released their debut single, ‘We Always Lose’, the product of working with producer Tony Doogan, famous for his work with acts such as Mogwai and Belle and Sebastian. “We’d always tried to get that kind of growing, building Mogwai sound, that huge wall of sound that they can have. He kind of got that out of us, which is really cool,” Stephen says proudly. Working with Doogan in the studio, the band opted for authenticity rather than perfection. “Tony’s quite old-school in his approach, he does it like you would if you’re recording on tape,” Stephen explains. “So pretty much the whole thing is done about seventy percent live. He just said, ‘You’ve got three chances to put this down, whatever the best one is, that’s what we’ll go for.’ There’s no point trying to go for perfection, it’s an energy and a feeling that he wants. So we had three chances, chose the best one, and then we moved on.”