Meryl Streek rages onwards with another volatile piece of full on punk poetry with his venomous prose aimed at landlords and politicians, revealing the grind of life in his hometown of Dublin and the struggles of the homeless due to the greed of the privileged. It’s a full on piece of great music with the familiar abbatoir samples the Smiths used on Meat Is Murder,ramped up high with an explosive mesh of guitar and fast paced drums that adds to the anger and hits hard. Read on…
Fast rising and exciting punk producer performer MERYL STREEK has released brand new single+video Counting Sheep. The single is taken off the recently announced brand new album Songs For The Deceased, produced by Dan Doherty (Fontaines D.C.), and Phil Wyer (owl sounds) who also plays guest guitars on this track. The album is set for release on October 25th through Venn Records (a label that has picked up talent early and released the likes of Marmozets, Bob Vylan, Wargasm, Aerial Salad and High Vis).
“This song was written about the daily grind of working full time your whole life 40 hours a week for a fraction of what you’re making for somebody else, all while you still struggle to pay the bills and maintain a side hobby. I am not calling the average worker a sheep as I’d be calling myself one too but what I’m trying to say with this track is art is important and when we don’t have a government supporting what we are all truly good at you’ll end up signing your life away to these big corporate companies and you’ll never do what you’re meant to do in life. You’ll blink and it’ll be over. Its also highlighting the fact every single politician in this country is a landlord and these are the people voting to abolish the eviction ban, which since being lifted has caused thousands of families to be kicked onto the already busy streets. It’s another reminder that these crooks in charge are getting away with what they want while we are being distracted to fight against each other. All they want is to keep us fighting among ourselves when we should be fighting back against them.” – MERYL STREEK
Today also sees MERYL STREEK announced some new live dates for Ireland, to add to the already announced October and November UK dates and record store signings. This tour follows his recent appearance at this years 2000trees Festival, as well as previously playing in Dublin with The Dead Kennedys, touring Ireland with Bob Vylan, and then Enter Shikari, touring the UK with PiL, playing shows with Benefits, and touring the UK with Kneecap. ALL live dates are below:
ANNOUNCED LIVE DATES:
May 23-24, 2025 – Sonic Rites, Helsinki (Finland)
3rd-5th January – Rockaway Beach, Bognor Regis
6th November – Glasgow – King Tuts (as part of Curve Festival)
17th-18th October – Left of the Dial, Netherlands
OCTOBER ALBUM INSTORES:
25th October – Just Dropped In, Coventry
26th October – Venus Vinyl, Norwich
27th October – Banquet, Kingston (Fighting Cocks)
28th October – Pie and Vinyl, Southsea
29th October – The LP Cafe, Watford
NOVEMBER UK HEADLINE TOUR DATES:
15th November – Birmingham – Actress & Bishop
14th November – Bristol – Crofters
13th November – Brighton – The Hope & Ruin
12th November – London – Lower Third
10th November – Southampton – Joiners
9th November – Sheffield – Hallamshire Hotel
8th November – Manchester – Soup Kitchen
7th November – Newcastle – Lubber Fiend
29th November – Dublin – Whelan’s – JUST ADDED DATE
30th November – Belfast – Ulster sports club – JUST ADDED DATE
Tickets on sale now here
Born and raised in Dublin, MERYL STREEK remembers his childhood in Ireland fondly. “Growing up it was great,” he says. “I had a lot of family around me and things were good, we were a working class family of independent screen printers.” During the leaner and more difficult years that followed, he grew up and the world changed around him. He lost several family members, and austerity closed in on the country. As the recession hit and work became steadily thinner on the ground, he moved to Canada—a 7 year experience that shaped MERYL STREEK both as a person and as an artist, as he explains, “Seeing how countries work outside of Ireland, and seeing how unfair Ireland’s work ethic and living situations are, I came back here fuelled to try and make a change.”
With his father a talented drummer in his own right, and the call of punk rock’s ethics and morals so strong, it was perhaps an inevitability that he would eventually fall into that same world. “My dad was an unbelievable drummer, I was raised being around punk bands like Crass and anarcho-punks Rudimentary Peni. I remember seeing him play growing up as a kid and that was the start of my growth as a musician. Following in these parental musical footsteps, MERYL STREEK began in earnest when he finally quit his former band to try and give a voice to those he saw struggling in his home country. “I just said ‘I need to do my own thing’ and try to help the ordinary people in Ireland who’ve been suffering,” he says. “I do it for my father who has now passed on. I know what it’s like to feel betrayed and hurt, and I want to devote my life to helping others as best I can. The music may sound vicious to some, but times are changing and the government here in Ireland aren’t.”
Mostly recorded at home in his Vancouver apartment over the best part of a year, his debut album 796 arrived on 4th November 2022 and cemented itself as one of the most visceral, important political records of the decade so far. It shone a light on the 796 bodies of children found in a septic tank at Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Taum, Ireland, a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children run by Catholic nuns. Armed with just a microphone and a laptop, in less than a year MERYL STREEK went from playing his first show in a Dublin squat to performing live at Kentish Town Forum supporting post-punk pioneers Public Image Ltd. The combination of news samples, rumbling bass and a front-man marching through crowds spitting out truth like his life depended on it cemented the Irish poet as the punk scene’s new saviour, embodying the essence of the genre while simultaneously reinventing it.
Much like the first album, Songs For The Deceased saw MERYL STREEK enter the Dublin recording studio Darklands Audio with producer Dan Doherty (Fontaines D.C.). “The album came about in bits and pieces due to the amount of gigging. I got so carried away with playing live I forgot about the recording side of things and what matters the most to me.”. To push the music into new spaces, guest musicians were invited to collaborate on tracks along the way. Benefits front man Kingsley Hall provides spoken word to the album’s Interlude, Cal Graham from UK punks The Chisel appears on forthcoming single Dogs and influential musician Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangements contorts his guitar sound for a truly experimental outro on the song Murder. “I’m delighted to have some of my favourite artists on this record with me and very thankful that they are.”
The songs move from the deeply personal (Paddy is a tribute to his uncle Paddy, a unique individual who chose to live life by his own terms), political (Bertie directly targets controversial Irish politician Bertie Ahern), social (Gambling Death deals with gambling addiction head on), to tragedies from Irish history (Stardust remembers the victims of the fire that took place at the Stardust venue Feb 14th 1981, killing 48 people and leaving families begging for answers as to why the disaster happened in the first place). “It was only when I finished recording the new album I realised I had made a record that revolved around people and events around my hometown of Dublin. Now, I admit it’s not always a pretty picture I’m painting, and it probably never will be, but these are cases that desperately need awareness.”
For MERYL STREEK it’s business as usual. “This is a collection of stories about Betrayal, Murder, Injustice, and Corruption. It’s not just happening in Ireland, it’s happening around the world and we’re supposed to just take it lying down?”. Songs For The Deceased isn’t just about his hometown, it’s an album about people and their relationship with a society that continues to let them down. It’s a tale as old as time, on a global scale. There will always be stories to tell and injustices to highlight, and MERYL STREEK won’t let us forget quickly.
Songs For The Deceased is released on October 25th through Venn Records, pre-order here.
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Forewords by Wayne Carey, Reviews Editor for Louder Than War. His author profile is here
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