When I meet with NewDad’s Julie Dawson over Zoom, the Galway frontwoman is enjoying a well-deserved break from rehearsal. In a few days, they’ll play the Dome in London, their first gig as a trio following bassist Cara Joshi’s departure in March.

Since releasing their supernova of a debut with Madra last year, the London-based rockers have been gearing towards a follow-up. The latest taster from the newly reformed NewDad – Dawson, Fiachra Parslow and Sean O’Dowd – is the infectious EP Safe, which Dawson tells me offers a peek into the band’s new direction.

“We wanted Safe to sound more confident without having to be big or bombastic,” she says. “We just wanted the songs to do the talking more so than the instrumentation. It’s our first time not working with Chris W Ryan, and we worked with Sam Breathwick, aka Shrink, on this EP. They were very different, but equally amazing, experiences.

“There was a lot of getting used to approaching our music in a new way. For a long time, I had barred acoustic guitars from the NewDad sound... I just didn’t like them! But then I realised I had just never played a nice one. I’d say every single track on this EP has either a nylon or steel string acoustic guitar, and I love the brightness of that sound.”

For Dawson, it’s a welcome shift from the shoegaze sound of their debut. For most of its existence, the genre promised a glimpse of an alternate plane of existence – a soundtrack for the more introverted rocker. But with Safe, NewDad have ventured into fresh terrain.

“It’s taken time to be confident in our craft,” says Dawson. “It can be really hard to be proud of the work when you’re doing music, because you’re always following up with the next thing. We are certainly proud of our work and we love the dreamy, shoegaze-y land of Madra. But as we’ve gotten older, we’ve wanted to be more direct and not hide behind anything.”

The China blue environs of Madra were conjured on the band’s home turf in Galway, but this EP situates the trio along the bustling streets and metropolitan beats of London, where they’ve been based for over three years. Naturally, the atmosphere of the city filtered into the songwriting.

“There’s a lot of urgency in a city like London,” offers Julie. “You’re always going somewhere. I found it stressful as someone from a town of 80,000 people – I think you can hear that in the music. Whereas with Madra, of course it had a chaotic feel, but it was oddly serene. That was based on the feeling of being comfortable at home and letting things pad along. It definitely influenced the way we started making music. Whether we want it to or not, it all drips into the music.”

Lyrically, Safe explores Dawson’s personal growth, from being a yes-woman to becoming more assertive and self-assured within the music biz.

“I’m a big people-pleaser, and in the music industry, it can be really easy to lose your voice and just go along with things,” she says. “You’re constantly having loads of opinions thrown at you and you want to make everyone happy. But after three years over here, we have a better understanding of what we want our career to look like.

“This EP deals with that a lot, especially with pandering to people and not standing up for yourself. It’s about the expectations versus the reality of what this industry is like. We moved from Galway to London and figured if it goes well, we’ll be musicians. That will be our job, it’ll be so fun and amazing. We’re very lucky that it happened for us and there’s nothing else we’d rather be doing.

“But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. There’s a lot of pressure on us and that’s what I’m trying to work through in these songs. I just realised I couldn’t be a people-pleaser anymore. As an artist, you have to stay true to yourself and follow your own gut.”

Safe is out now.