Communion One presents Madra Salach live at XOYO Birmingham!

“It’s easy to overestimate how much of an individual you are. You exist in the complete context of the uncountable generations that came before you. The idea that your self is just the person on your birthday, I think that’s incorrect.”

Paul Banks says these words the way a different artist might talk to you about a chord shape. This is just how he works, and it’s the ancient beating heart of Gorta, the debut album by Madra Salach, a record that treats hunger as the oldest thing Ireland hands down and asks - softly at first, then with the volume up - what you’re meant to do with the inheritance.

Ask the 24-year-old what he’d say to himself at nine and he doesn’t go reaching for anything clever. He goes straight for the one question that was under everything else.

“If I was speaking to my future self, the only thing I’d ask is, did you manage to pull it off with the music?” The answer, unequivocally, is yes. “It’s always kind of been the dream,” he says.

You could almost date it. Banks was fifteen, on the 29A into town when ‘Sally MacLennane’ came on. The trad he’d dismissed as stuffy turned out to have had the punk run through it the whole way back. Damascus by way of Dublin Bus.

For Jack Lawlor it sat off to one side of a life that was meant to go a different direction. Music was the thing you didn’t admit to counting on. “It’s a little bit dangerous,” says Lawlor, “to hold on to a belief that you’ll get there.” They held on anyway, and here they are.

Madra Salach are six of them, out of Dublin’s Northside, most friends since their early teens: Banks on vocals, Lawlor on bass, Adam Cullen on guitar, Jack Martin on mandolin, whistle and synth, Maxime Arnold on harmonium, and Dara Duffy on drums. The name means dirty dog. Gorta is the debut they expect everything after it to be measured against. “I’m proud of the EP and what it did,” Banks says, “but I’d like to think that when people talk about this band, they start with this album.”

Banks, Cullen and Duffy were a trad three-piece playing standards in Raheny pubs. Off to one side, Banks and Martin were feeding those same old songs through synths and tape loops. “The idea was to take traditional Irish songs and rearrange them with ambient tape loops, that kind of thing,” says Banks. “It was a niche concept that excited us. And then we were writing originals as well, and it just broadened and broadened.” When the two met, what happened was nearer transubstantiation than anything: the old songs taken in whole, the outward form left as it was, the substance changed to something else entirely. Banks still sounds caught out by it all. “I think of us as rooted in Irish folk, but you could nearly call us alternative. I’m surprised how much we’ve broadened the scope since we started.”

“Nearly” is pure-cut humility, the Northside kind, which comes with a glint: this is an alternative band, outright. They’re not traditionally trained, as Lawlor puts it, though every one of them has been “at the music” since childhood. For a long time the band ran alongside ordinary work. Banks spent a year and a bit as a special needs assistant at a school in Baldoyle. “Far and away the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “If you asked what I’m proud of on a molecular level, it’d be that year.”

‘It’s a Hell of an Age’ was the trad band with Lawlor’s bass added afterwards. Gorta went down with all six of them together. “The six-part writing was really quite seamless,” says Lawlor. It pushed them away from the safe record and toward something that flips the script: the tradition with distortion and drone run straight through it, a guitar band with a folk heart the size of a parish.

Many have rightly reached for a comparison to Lankum, but ØXN may be nearer the mark. Radie Peat’s other outfit pushes the darkness in folk further and builds it into a sealed dramatic world of its own, and that’s the ghost estate Gorta haunts, too. ‘Hunger,’ a song about the thing that kills, arrives dressed in a whack-fol-the-diddle singalong.

‘Ribbon Factory’ is a resounding way in. Penned by Cullen and recorded with Loren Humphrey in New York, it’s the song they’ve carried longest. Banks remembers hearing it arranged for the first time and saying, half-joking, “this is the only rock and roll you’re going to get.” It’s the last song on the record with its head still on. Everything after it is run from the gut.

The EP did the unlikeliest thing for a debut: reaching the top three of the Irish albums chart and the UK independent top ten, with 6 Music support and a Maida Vale session behind it. A summer of festivals followed, along with a support slot with Kneecap and a place on the Shane MacGowan tribute record. None of it has filled the hunger that got them here, and that’s the point.

That hunger - the clenched-jaw charge under every track - has a name, and it’s the album’s. Gorta is the Irish for hunger, and hunger moves through every track wearing a different face. Banks writes from close in. The private ache kept opening out onto something far older. “The ideas of longing and yearning, all the kinds of hunger, they slot into where we are as 21st century Irish people. The more I’ve thought and written about Irishness, the more I’ve seen how strange a history and a position and a culture we have.” A hunger “not a million miles away from personal experience,” says Banks, set down next to An Gorta Mór, the Famine in the language of the people who starved through it, next to a hole that was never going to be filled.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” says Banks. “Looking back on the writing, it emerged.” The animals crept in the same way. Nobody set out to stock an LP with a foal, a show horse, a circus horse and a stolen sheep, and then they looked back and the whole ark was there. “I had the same realisation,” says Banks. “Where are all these animals coming from? It wasn’t conscious.” The foal is the man. The man is the field. The field is the people who were made to leave it. Because Gorta is a record about inheritance; about how little of any of us is only us. Every generation here has been handed the same ache and told it was theirs alone.

The sleeve of Gorta holds all of that in a single figure: a Blemmyes, one of the akephaloi of ancient legend, the headless ones whose faces sat in their chests. Oscar Torrans pulls in so close the body falls away. What’s left is surface; wet and molten, silver and bruise-blue and tarnished bronze, and a face coming up through it, or going under. A brow. A socket. A dark hollow that could be a mouth, open. Roaring, or singing? It’s hard to say, and that’s what makes it beatific rather than monstrous: a saint in a roadside grotto, caught at the second agony turns into something else. Ecstasy, after all, only ever meant standing outside yourself. “You’re trying to be possessed by the sound,” says Lawlor of what the band go after on stage. “To open yourself up.”

And it’s the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, a body with no start and no finish, feeding on itself.

What lifts Gorta clear of feature-length lament is the first thing you notice about it, a skin-whitening, almost levitational will to get out from under the whole inheritance thing rather than sing it back one more time. “We wanted a uniquely Irish album,” Banks says, “but not one that’s conveniently Irish in a marketable sense. We’re not oblivious to how trendy it is. But we were making this music before that, and in ten years, when the hype’s gone, we’d like to think we’d still be doing it.”

The moment has already claimed them. But a wave is only water going the one way, and this has current of its own. A full, cresting arrival, one that would have landed just as hard in a year when nobody was looking at Ireland, and a band that will still be standing when the tide has gone back out.

That’s the break in the loop: a generation that inherited the hunger and, instead of passing it on unexamined, turned round and looked it full in the face. Gorta goes out, by way of ‘Haunted Isle of Green,’ on “hungry no more”, three words that land like a benediction, and then a breath later comes the penance: the hunger “won’t fade fast”. Madra Salach are the son of the hungry one who, for once, turns around.