Curfew Step Into the Spotlight With Haunting Debut LP Black Doll’s Eyes
- Stacey
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
North Dublin trio Curfew have always occupied an interesting space in Ireland’s alternative landscape: too cinematic to be boxed into classic hard-rock, too emotionally attuned to be written off as pure guitar grit. With their debut album Black Doll’s Eyes, the band finally crystallise their identity: dark, dynamic, and deeply human.
Formed by Jj Smilez, Gavin Dunne, and Mick Caffrey, Curfew’s ascent has felt both organic and inevitable. They’ve quietly become a staple of the Irish live circuit. Now, they’re ready for a bigger stage, with a headline show at The Grand Social on 23 December to celebrate their album’s release.
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Shaun Cadogan at Temple Lane Studios, Black Doll’s Eyes channels the band’s signature tension between scale and rawness. It’s a record that moves like a film reel: wide-angled, shadowy, and steeped in personal mythology. Themes of dislocation, self-reckoning, and emotional volatility run through its core, portraying relationships as terrains marked by both weight and absence.
Nowhere is that duality more present than in standout track “Flaketown.” Musically, it gleams with retro tones - a flash of 80s-washed nostalgia submerged in modern production. Lyrically, it positions itself firmly in the now. Curfew trace the frictions of love in an era ruled by screens, mapping the micro-failures and digital distractions that chip away at connection. Lines like “Swipe it down, then forget I ever saw it / though I love you, I forget to tell you” capture the quiet ache of habit and hypnosis.
“Flaketown” becomes a psychological space - a liminal zone where being physically present but mentally elsewhere has become a cultural condition. Within the broader arc of Black Doll’s Eyes, it acts as a negative image: the shadow cast by the heavier emotional weight of the record, a reminder that absence can be just as defining as presence.
With Black Doll’s Eyes, Curfew arrive as a band stepping fully into themselves. It’s a debut that feels lived-in, cinematic, and self-assured - a striking first chapter from a group that clearly has much more to say.
Black Doll’s Eyes lands 25 November. Curfew headline The Grand Social, Dublin on 23 December.
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