READY FOR VILLANELLE?
With analogue instincts
and a relentless live presence,
the London rockers are earning their
rise one room at a time.
Words by Anagricel Duran
Captured by Simon Emmett
Back in 2005, a scrappy band from Sheffield, named Arctic Monkeys began to stir something you couldn’t quite measure. Their rise wasn’t engineered; it spread by word of mouth, through burned CDs, crowded rooms, and early uploads to MySpace. It was undeniable momentum you could feel building in real time.
Two decades later, that kind of ascent feels almost mythical, buried beneath algorithms and endless scrolling, which is exactly why the London-based trio Villanelle stand out. The band – comprised of bassist Jack Schiavo, guitarist Ben Taylor, and frontman Gene Gallagher, son of rock icon Liam Gallagher – have started to carve their own path.
The rockers formed roughly three years ago after Gallagher met Taylor via mutual friends when word got out that he was looking to form a band. Schiavo would later join as bassist after the frontman met him “randomly while having a pub sesh night out sort of thing.” There was no grand design or industry matchmaking, just proximity, chance, and a shared desire to make music.
In a landscape where hype is manufactured, they’ve stuck to the analogue, building buzz in rooms, passing it between people, earning it night by night and shared through fan-captured live videos. Villanelle aren’t just another band on the rise; they’re one you’re told about, the kind you’re meant to believe the hype about.
“We definitely didn’t oversaturate our social media. If you look at our Instagram from when we first got started, we were posting the most cryptic stuff,” Schiavo explains while sitting on a sofa in his flat over a Zoom call. He shares that the choice in being “as cryptic as possible” was made so that people could “make their own judgments based on what they saw on stage.”
Villanelle’s first release came in the form of debut single ‘Hinge’, a blistering track that feels like it could be catalogued with the likes of Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, Elastica and the Smashing Pumpkins. “Don’t tell no soul / I’m on my own,” Gallagher sings over a rolling bass line and pounding drums. They followed that up with two other tracks, the heavy ‘Placebo’ and the pop-punk tinged ‘Measley Means’, the latter also lending its name to their forthcoming EP, which is set for release on May 6.
The EP is a five-track snapshot of a band in motion. Villanelle had spent two years working on their songs and creating a collection of tracks that they then took on the road in 2024. “That was where we were road testing things,” Taylor shares. That same year, they had the amazing opportunity to play arenas, serving as the opening act for Liam Gallagher’s Definitely Maybe 30th anniversary tour.
“We got to the end of a massive year doing some insanely amazing things. And then it was about going in and really laying that foundation down,” Taylor shares. “We’ve tested these songs out as much as we possibly can, and now we need to go in and actually lay this down.”
Musically, Villanelle aren’t too focused on creating their own unique sound, but rather dipping into the past with a “desire to bring back rock”. But how can they revive something that has been on the come-up for a while now?
“I meant bring that back more for ourselves, rather than bringing it back to the world,” Taylor shares, clearing up a previous quote of his that made its way to the press and had been taken out of context.
While growing up in the 2010s, the trio saw guitar music drift into the indie sounds of the 2013-2016 era and ultimately resurge during the post-pandemic era. Their response to this wasn’t to “reinvent rock,” but rather to reconnect with it and focus on what made rock exciting in the first place.
That ethos carries into their influences – bands like Nirvana, Deftones, and Arctic Monkeys – as well as genres like grunge, alongside a personal choice to reject the pressure to constantly innovate. “Everything now is so boring,” Gallagher says before explaining how to him, grunge “still sounds like the future of music.”
“Even though it’s been done before, it’s still refreshing to me,” he shares. He also opens up about the sense of gatekeeping and restriction that can occasionally be felt – a factor as to why he feels genres tend to die out,
“There are so many rules, and that’s what kills guitar music in general, not being ‘allowed’ to do certain things. You should be able to do what you want, make music that you want. There’s gonna be people out there that want to hear that shit live.”
This feeling may be why Villanelle sit slightly outside some of the music scenes in the UK, like the one orbiting The Windmill in Brixton. “Those guys are incredible. Very technical, very expressive,” Schiavo gushes. “But we just want to cane it and want it to be fun and exciting and have [our sound] come out naturally from us, not as virtuosos or anything, but just as people trying to play something raw.”
“I just want to make music that I like. That’s all I care about,” Gallagher adds. “I’m not trying to make music to please a certain comeback, or all this other stuff. This is the music I like, and I’m sure some people like it, and that’s it.”
2026 is set to be a big year for the band as they will embark on their first North American headlining tour and are slated to play some of the biggest U.S festivals this summer, such as Lollapalooza, Governors Ball, Shaky Knees, and Vans Warped Tour.
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Though stepping into new territory may seem daunting, playing live is what has been keeping the band moving forward. “Every time you play a gig, you’re always one step ahead of where you were when you last did a gig,” shares Gallagher. “That’s quite inspiring to always, constantly be outdoing yourself and doing better and better.”
It’s a philosophy that has been reinforced by recent moments, most noticeably hearing crowds sing back their lyrics for the first time. “That was a fully different experience, even though we played live hundreds of times now. It was a moment of seeing something change in a really positive way,” Taylor recalls with a smile plastered on his face.
It’s there, in that immediacy, that Villanelle make the most sense. Not as a band chasing the future, but as one reclaiming something more fundamental: connection, instinct, and the slow, steady build of something real.
As for what they hope to achieve this year, “Locking in our live set and getting that down to a place where we’re really coming into our own,” Taylor shares earnestly while Schiavo adds: “Making as many fans as we can along the way.” For Gene in true Gallagher cheekiness – “World domination!”
