MARKIEVICZ’s GUERRILLA Is the Debut Album Demanding Your Attention

There are bands that arrive polished, focus-grouped, and algorithm-ready. Then there’s MARKIEVICZ.

xcaliber, J.F.O, and objectsnwo have spent the last four years operating in the margins, writing, producing, and refining their sound in bedrooms and basements across Dublin, invisible to the industry machinery but impossible to ignore if you were paying attention. Now, with the release of GUERRILLA, their debut EP, they’re no longer waiting to be invited in. They’re kicking the door down.

The name is a statement of intent. Constance Markievicz, revolutionary, suffragette, the kind of woman who didn’t ask permission, casts a long shadow over this project, and the trio wear it like armour. GUERRILLA is exactly what it promises: disruptive, unapologetic, and built for conflict. Self-produced, self-engineered, and creatively inseparable, MARKIEVICZ operate as a small unit in an industry engineered to favour the big ones. The defiance is audible in every frequency.

Sonically, the EP moves like memory dissolving in real time, ghostly pads evaporate into distorted drums, delicate melodies collapse under the weight of blown-out bass, and moments of clarity are swallowed back into emotional static. It’s the sound of three artists who have something to prove, and nothing left to lose.

But GUERRILLA‘s real power lies in what it conceals beneath the abrasion. This is a record about survival, not transcendence, heartbreak, addiction, displacement, and identity crisis documented in real time, with an honesty that feels almost intrusive. On “Blackened Hands”, politically charged imagery and grunge instrumentation collide with meditations on self-destruction and inherited trauma. “Brandy Blues” drifts through woozy melodies like the soundtrack to the morning after emotional collapse, stripped-back and unsparing.

Death lingers throughout, not as theatre but as conversation,  in passing thoughts, fragmented prayers, half-awake anxieties. xcaliber’s refrain, “I’m havin’ visions of my grave, can you wait?”, captures the project’s atmosphere precisely: a world where burnout, substance abuse, paranoia and hopelessness blur into the texture of everyday life. There’s something unmistakably Irish in this darkness,  the same poetic fatalism that has threaded through generations of storytelling here, where humour and despair share a barstool until closing time.

That tension between beauty and chaos gives GUERRILLA its weight. Despite spanning songs written across multiple years, the EP feels remarkably cohesive, held together by xcaliber’s in-house production and the trio’s near-telepathic chemistry. Since meeting in 2021, they’ve sharpened their sound through solo releases, underground shows, and collaborative projects before officially consolidating under the MARKIEVICZ banner following a support slot for Conway The Machine in 2024. Yet nothing about GUERRILLA feels calculated or industry-minded. Its refusal to smooth out its rough edges is precisely what makes it compelling.

This is music made by people trying to understand themselves in the act of making it,  raw, unstable, deeply self-aware, and impossible to ignore.

GUERRILLA is out now.