Forty minutes into the interview Shrug Life’s Danny Carroll admits that he missed the initial phone call for the interview as he had been sleeping. He worries that he’s not being coherent enough after waking abruptly from his slumber and that he doesn’t have sufficiently interesting enough answers to the questions, Carroll had no reason to worry. If you are familiar with Shrug Life’s music, then you’ll be aware of the razor sharp wit and on point observations in the lyrics. Carroll is as engaging in real life as he is on record, full of banter and keen to take an interest in the person he’s talking with. It stems from his own time as an interviewer and the tone is more conversational than a straight up Q&A.

The good news is Shrug Life are releasing their debut album, ¯_(?)_/¯ ,  on 29th Sept. It’s been a relatively slow year for Irish guitar music worth shouting about. Irrespective, Shrug Life’s self-titled debut would stand out in one jam packed with releases. Shrug Life meld earworm hooks with lyrics that prick your consciousness. The album is full of rapid guitars, backed by a bustling rhythm section, topped off with the aforementioned acerbic lyrics.

Carroll and his band mates (Keith Broni and Josh Donnelly) have been jamming together since summer 2014 and some of the songs on the album have been around since their formative jam session “the second track Temp Job is one of the earlier tracks we would have played at open mics at the time. That was pretty much written when I was working at a dead end job at a call centre”.

Many songwriters bookmark times in their lives in song, but what sets Carroll apart is that he didn’t just document that in a song to whine about his existence instead it was to “amuse myself by comparing my line manager to Benito Mussolini which was my way of a coping mechanism.”

Recording the album involved some unusual scheduling as Shrug Life’s bass player Keith Broni went to London for a year to do a Master’s degree in psychology in September 2015 “it was a cut off point for the band in terms of him going away” and it lead to Carroll saying “fuck it we’ll record all the songs we have written thus far and that way there will be something for me to tinker about with in his absence.”

Whilst balancing college and other commitments Carroll and producer Fiachra McCarthy worked on the album during “idle weekends or between family stuff, work and all these other commitments that we had. I was studying at the time and working two jobs.” It was a time consuming process but Carroll admits that Shrug Life “created barriers to getting to done quicker. I’m happy that it’s done now at this stage. It is what it is.”

The album is the culmination of a lot of effort and creative energy that Carroll and his band-mates have poured into it over several years.

The debut album for many is the final release of ideas and thoughts that have evolved from the first inclination to make music.

For Carroll that process began with the question of what to do with the pot of cash he received for his confirmation. “All the kids got money but my parents weren’t into giving me money for something they know I wasn’t really putting any thought behind. At that age (11) I wanted a guitar”.

Carroll admits that at the time he and his friends “were into terrible, dreadful, fucking music like Sum 41 or stuff like that” but in time he finally discovered one band that he became obsessed with “I got Thin Lizzy’s greatest hits and they were the reason I kept playing the guitar. I wanted to be in a band from that point onwards.”

Aged 15, Danny met Keith Broni in school. “He was bit pretentious, I was a bit pretentious. He could play Suffragette City by David Bowie on the bass which is a hard song to play and I thought alright let's start playing music”.  

However, Carroll would later have an epiphany whereby he realised that that he had to write music

“I went and made a music documentary with Eric Bell from Thin Lizzy a few years ago which was very much like a pilgrimage for the reason I wanted to play music in the first place.”

It was like an eureka moment where it all makes sense “it was like ‘this is the best interview am I ever going to do in my life, this is going to be most important thing I do without playing music myself, so I really got to start playing music’ which is a really weird thing to have when you a sat in a car in Skibbereen with a founding member of Thin Lizzy as it pours down rain.”

When asked to reflect upon his formative songwriter efforts as a teenager Carroll laughs “there is something to be said for the manure that grows the plant. Things that don’t flower became mulch for the others.” Not too many people will regard their initial offerings as manure, but it’s a glimpse into the self-deprecating side of Carroll’s humour that permeates his songs. But this wasn’t always the case in the early days “I hadn’t found a way to communicate a degree of humour or step outside myself. It sounded excessively melodramatic or excessively earnest.”

When trying to define how he goes about it today Carroll explains that he tries to “write all the lyrics first. Then I try to put it to music with the guys. Musically it’s very much a collaboration.” What he really gets a kick out of however is the “spontaneous moments in the rehearsal room” where the “outside world falls away.”

He cites an example of a song being born out of a joke in a rehearsal room when Josh told him he should write a song called Buy our merch. “(this) planted a seed in my head and then I was thinking about a sign I seen which said ‘Art for Sale’ which made me think about what value people put on records or albums anymore. I’m trying to write a song which is our version of ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna To Rock’n’Roll)’.”

Carroll is quite clear on what he wants to see and hear in his lyrics “I like having lived a lot of the experiences which I’ve put into a song. It makes it genuine; it makes it real for people. I don’t like throw away lyrics or lyrics that are too oblique and obtuse. So many songs don’t let you into the story or the meaning of the lyrics.”

Chances are you may not have heard of US micro label Jigsaw Records, but they have in fact been doing a lot of work with Irish bands you may have heard of such as Galants and So Cow. It was through the acquaintance of Brian Kelly of So Cow/Half Forward Line that Shrug Life’s album is set to receive a stateside release. “I sent it to Brian to get some advice as he's been doing it along time and he has brought out music with different labels. He suggested Jigsaw and that’s how it came about. They’ve been helpful so far. They got us some attention is some places in the US and are easy to deal with.”

When asked if the album would lead to world domination, Carroll laughs and manically cackled back “World Domination!!!” Thinking about it for a second he continues “Shrug Life is the shared hobby of three men from Dublin and that’s kind of what it is. It can be exhausting to think of all the other things like the music business.”  Humbly the aim is “To keep it going and remain mates with the guys I play music with. To keep challenging each other and not repeating what we’ve done thus far. Either people get it or they don’t.”

Before wrapped up the interview there was one last topic to discuss. If you are familiar with Shrug Life’s first EP (and if you are not, rectify that pronto), then you’ll be aware of a song called Long Ball Game, which is an ode to former Irish international footballer Kevin Kilbane. When Northern Irish act Wonder Villains released the song Zola several years ago they got Italian footballing legend Gianfranco Zola to appear in the video. So is there a chance Carroll could get Kilbane to do the same thing for Shrug Life?

“I was a Chelsea fan growing up so Zola is pretty sacred. Seeing him in this video, of this (song) hurts. I think Kilbane doesn’t have the same legacy to hurt, so I would gladly get him in my back garden playing football or being a referee. I think it would have to be a guerrilla filming endeavour.”