It’s 9am. Bleary-eyed, I’m about to start my work day, mentally calculating chickenpox incubation periods and wondering whether an upcoming holiday is at risk of disappearing in a haze of calamine lotion. I’m so close to it now I might manifest salt air if I squint. Then I notice an email advertising something called Really Good Time in the inbox and think to myself: what else is there to lose? I press play and wake up almost instantly. I’ve never put pen to paper quicker.
There’s a small pleasure in being ambushed by a record before the first hit of caffeine. With a name I’d otherwise have filed under clickbait, the Dublin trio are already gathering momentum, although this slightly undersells a band that’s lost a guitarist somewhere around SXSW and used it as a propulsive kick up the backside. Three people now sound like a browser about to crash from countless notifications impossible to close; somehow, this is more fun to listen to than it is to live inside my head. With their debut Affirmations, I suspect Really Good Time have made an album about the gap between panic and the impassive joke you make afterwards: the sound of someone laughing at the exact moment they should be screaming. Which this morning feels about right.
Ten songs (plus a cheeky extra) is a frightening proposition for attention spans these days. Barely halfway through opener ‘On Dublin Bus’, I’m already wondering how they intend to sustain this pace and calibre. The scene is set: loathing and decay share a handrail, packed in tight with everyone’s egos and status obsessions, all of it rattling towards the same last stop, which is death or the slow erasure of whatever anyone thought made them the main character. Economic despair, online radicalisation, performative identity. All symptoms of a disease and the bus is the digester, the high pressure machine built to break down bone, or food, or anything else fed into it. There’s a familiar despair in the way chaos settles into the repeated refrain “it’s beautiful how time will make sweet nothing from us all”. No number of affirmations and no amount of self-mythologising will stop us from eventually being reduced to the same anonymous pulp. We’re all passengers here.
Then ‘Shit One’ doubles down. Bass and drums sit bright and cheerful up front, the kind of mix that practically guarantees at least a decent enough time, and sometimes the guitar arrives almost dissonant, a bit like a joke landing wrong on purpose. Obviously, this is political. If you’re not going to be, what exactly are you doing with a song called that? It works the horrifying vow that work will set you free through concentration camp propaganda and sci-fi utopian sales pitch, all but a costume party for the same lie. There’s an urgency to it that refuses you the comfort of just nodding along in the background, and that’s Affirmations’ entire MO. Nothing on this record settles into one mode for long. Songs lurch between wiry dance-y grooves and bursts of noise that threaten to spiral out entirely. The hooks arrive with half a fish’s head still attached, blood still running through it. Hope and collapse keep pulling at each other, grooves simmer until they turn hypnotic, the body insisting on moving even as everything else seemingly falls apart. It’s a disciplined album wearing some genuinely maximalist rags, and it never buckles under them, which suggests a band with more control than the chaos on the surface would have you believe. I’d bet good money they’re an absolute menace live.
‘Dig up, Stupid’ and ‘Life, Life’ stretch beyond seven and eight minutes respectively and somehow never lose their nerve. Jagged guitar and abrasive bursts of noise coalesce with moments of respiro, and structurally, a subtle desert rock chassis carries a post-punk engine that burns hot with self-aware bravado and irony. Absurdist humour is once again doing serious lifting, hiding a vision of humanity reduced to labour, followers, consumers, all digging towards a promoted purpose that never seems to surface. Affirmations is a cornucopia of everything that’s plaguing the modern psyche: Ryanair, fascism, motivational speaking, robot sex, dating apps, the manosphere, sometimes all of these stacked inside a few lines. It works because it recreates what consciousness actually feels in the year of our lord 2026, when every cultural register arrives at once and competes for the same three seconds of undivided attention. Once you’re done counting the references, you realise Really Good Time don’t retreat into nihilism, either sonically or conceptually. Instead, the songs oscillate between comedy and a strange kind of tenderness. Perhaps humour and love are the only materials left to build with.
The real question here is an ancient one: how do we live in this, when it all feels nonsensical and increasingly meaningless, and the information never stops arriving? Really Good Time don’t have an answer. They just make standing still feel like the worst possible option. With a smirk, their promise delivered.