Villanelle are becoming rock’n’roll stars in their own grungy image

“It’s going incredible!” Gene Gallagher says, throwing one arm behind his head as he sinks into a worn sofa in the basement of the label offices. He wears oversized, fly-eyed sunglasses that read as deliberate Cobain wink more than costume; his posture is relaxed, his grin habitual. Beside him, Ben Taylor and Jack Schiavo trade asides with the easy geometry of people who sleep on the same van floor enough to know one another’s rhythms. For a trio who only met by chance in the summer of 2023, they move like a band that’s already learned to fit around each other.

Villanelle arrived on the radar quickly — NME 100 nod, a Nirvana-leaning debut single called “Hinge” and a sound that wants fuzz and spit more than Britpop cheek. The three of them say they prefer to make noise that hits like an amp turned up too loud; their touring choices have reflected that. By early April they had just finished supporting Miles Kane, playing academies and university rooms rather than festival headline slots. “It was great, man,” Schiavo says. “We were playing the Academies and those kinds of places. It was great to be doing that and trying to collect some more fans as we hadn’t done a support slot for a while.”

The tour with Kane produced the kind of small, vivid scenes that then become band lore. Schiavo laughs about trying to drag a sober Gallagher into the sauce — “Gene was sober the whole tour because he was on antibiotics, so me and Ben were drinking for three” — and of a headliner who, they insist, was oddly unflappable when tempted into chaos. The backstage banter is affectionate and specific; it feels like memory more than myth.

Still, the myth-making does not ignore the petty details. Gallagher remembers everything, Schiavo says — the late nights, the tiny embarrassments — and delights in holding them over his bandmates the next day. Taylor calls him “the physical embodiment of a hangover”; Gallagher willingly self-identifies as the group’s “sleep paralysis demon.” His chosen vice on the road is incongruous: a Steam Deck and Dave The Diver, late-night fishing and sushi-making routines that will, he admits, keep him awake if the others try to turn in. “You can’t be going to bed when I’m fishing, bro,” he tells Ben with mock gravitas.

Those nights feed a work ethic that surfaces most clearly in small venues. Last year’s Punchbag run of university shows was gruelling and, by their description, formative. “You see the whites of their eyes,” Taylor says. “There are so many degrees of separation when you’re playing arenas. If they’re yawning, then you can’t really tell.” Gene remembers a Leeds crowd member filming reels during the set and losing his mojo for a second; the anecdote is delivered as both rueful and amused. It’s the sort of realism that keeps them humble — or at least honest about the parts of the job that feel ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly, the Gallagher name arrives as both ticket and target. The band’s baptism by fire came when Liam Gallagher invited them to open his 2024 anniversary run celebrating Oasis’s Definitely Maybe — the first gigs Villanelle ever played. “If you’re about this life and you want to do it, then fucking do it, right?” Gene recalls Liam saying. The three remember the shows as chaotic in the best possible way: slapdash, massive, formative. “We weren’t so aware of what was going on at the time,” Taylor says. “It was blissful ignorance.”

That access puts them squarely in the nepo conversation, which they mostly meet head-on. Taylor is blunt: “People know who Gene is. We’re a band that own that and appreciate everything that’s coming from that, but we also work extremely hard at the same time.” Gallagher, for his part, keeps circling back to an old-school ethos: make things you like, don’t give your head to the crowd. “If you start listening to what other people say, then you’re just going to drive yourself fucking crazy,” he says. There’s a palpable tension between inheritance and hustle in everything they say — a tension that will decide whether Villanelle remains a curiosity or becomes a durable act.

Musically, their debut EP Measly Means — due May 6 — leans into guitar-era signifiers with a self-aware grit. There’s Smashing Pumpkins shimmer filtered through Sabbathly heaviness and a surprising streak of grebo attitude that would’ve probably made Liam laugh. The title track is paranoid and chugging; “Squeeze” is lodged somewhere between a scuzzy ballad and a shout. “Opportunity” contains a line about “sitting facing backwards” that Gallagher uses as shorthand: it’s a song about getting your shit together, about the small, embarrassing discipline of doing the work.

They’re already plotting the next EP and saving ideas for a proper album, which suits their temperament. “I’m like a footballer, man,” Gene says. “I take it game by game.” It’s a pragmatic approach that matters in 2026: the industry rewards velocity but still needs a coherent identity. Villanelle have started fast because they can — because of the Liam invite, because of early press and a single that plugs into a current hunger for heavier guitar music — but their longer-term value will be judged on whether they can translate ragged-live energy into songs that survive being played on repeat, not just nights you remember because everyone was hanging off the barrier.

There are choices in how they present themselves. They say they don’t want to be a pop band; Gallagher brags, half-joking, that playing The Lexington was his tick-box moment. “I’ve officially made it, lads!” he beams. It’s a small, perfectly human admission: they love the small rooms, the messy nights, the unfairness of fame. That appetite for dirt over polish could make them conduits for a new generation that wants a harder edge — the band name-checks Deftones and Oasis as part of that lineage — or it could trap them in a period pastiche if they lean too heavily on other people’s icons.

At the moment the balance feels promising. Villanelle wear their inheritance like a loud jacket: visible, possibly gaudy, but not a disguise. They work shows, they bicker like brothers, they sneak game consoles backstage, they write songs about not wasting time. There’s a restlessness in that mix: a certainty that they want an audience that still knows how to pogo, but also a willingness to be modest about what counts as success in the short term.

Measly Means lands May 6. The band will play The Great Escape on May 15 — a test of whether their small-venue charm and legacy access can meet an industry that’s suddenly, thirstily, chasing guitar again.