Soda Blonde are back with Holy Roses ahead of the release of their debut album ‘Small Talk’ on July 9th. featuring the singles Small Talk, Terrible Hands and In The Heat Of The Night. As we’ve come to expect from Soda Blonde, Holy Roses finds the group exploring political topics with honesty and sensitivity, lifting the lid on the collective trauma of growing up in Catholic Ireland.
“So many of us use rejection as fuel to justify stagnancy or living in the past. Holy Roses provides me with some closure and I feel it’s one of the most important tracks on the album. I am directly addressing the people in my past who have hurt me in this song. The Rose is symbolic of war and the fleetingness of life and death,” explains singer Faye O’Rourke.
“It also represents the fall of Christianity, which I compare not only to our country’s dying Catholic status but to the oppression I felt throughout my own personal and worklife. Holy Roses is the moment of reckoning for me, in all respects. I’m letting go of the people who have hurt me and my old way of living.”
“With feminism on one shoulder and trans-generational Catholic guilt on the other, it’s hard to find your way as an Irish woman,” O’Rourke says. “The truth is, I’ve found that process of deprogramming myself extremely hard, and now I lie somewhere between the past and future.
“Small Talk touches on many things: indulging in the darkness, while also trying to derive some meaning from it; on having no degree; on the way I sabotaged multiple relationships, or let my parents down. It’s about looking for resolution and revolution in sex and politics. It’s about being abused mentally and physically by the people you love the most, and in turn, abusing the people who love you. It’s about my first heartbreak at 14, how it’s still intrinsically a part of me and the shame and embarrassment that it brings. It’s about having something you thought was a sure thing, like your career, ripped out from underneath you. It’s also about the idea of optical virtue over the reality of how we treat those around us”.