In our newest introductory interview, we step into the gritty, raw world of Irish post-hardcore with SOME IMAGES OF PARADISE. Inspired by the likes of FUGAZI and SLINT, and blending influences from modern internet culture to nostalgic sounds of Sigur Ros, this Limerick-based band has crafted something uniquely dark, intimate and powerful with their debut EP, “Hell is Overcrowded, the Dead Will Have No Place to Go”.
In their self-made release, the band dives deep into themes of religion, self-abuse, and mental illness, starting with the blistering noise rock track “There Used to Be a Carpet Here” and ending with the ambient pop meditation “Paschal Lamb.”
The EP offers an eclectic journey that showcases their wide array of writing and production skills. Their sound, a gritty blend of post-hardcore, ugly noise rock, indie and dark screamo, is laced with vicious, witchy vocals and experimental elements—a dirty mix of influences that’s hard to ignore.
For a closer look into the raw, unapologetic world of SOME IMAGES OF PARADISE, don’t miss our chat below. We sat down with the band to discuss their origins, local alternative scene, their creative process, and the intense themes behind their debut EP.
How did Some Images of Paradise come to be? What brought you together as a band.
Autumn: Some Images of Paradise was this idea i’d had for so many years, the name came from a Jonas Mekas quote and that notion of fleeting beauty, and the will to focus on that and create meaning from it. It was only last year the time felt right to fully capitalise on it, when that idea quickly became something I needed.
Evan and I would work together on odd bits and pieces and initially he was even poised to be the second guitarist, but experimenting together on cloud rap and ambient pop loosies, and even listening to his music and hearing his clear passion for percussion led me to ask him to be the drummer. I knew that what Kevin had as a bassist was exactly what I needed, someone that could hold down the groove and foundation but add colour when necessary, I think as a 3 piece it was a given but getting a guitarist was a different struggle, the way I play is so odd to begin with so it was hard to imagine who would suit it. We experimented with different guitarists for a bit til Darragh was recommended by a guitarist leaving, we were hesitant cause we’d never even met him or heard him play before but the moment we had that confidence together it just felt simple, it felt so obvious.
Kevin: Myself, Autumn and Evan have been friends for years and played in another project (Martian Subculture) so we’ve always been very musically connected. Autumn had some tracks written which they brought to us and everything really took off from there. Our friend Ben was originally playing with us but he was spending a lot of time doing bits with his bands Vacuity and Moving Home, but he recommended Darragh to us and he was a perfect fit
Darragh: I was asked to join as a replacement to a previous guitarist, in december of 2023 i think, the previous guitarist had just decided to leave the band and he recommend me taking his place. Before joining the band, i had seen Some Images play twice i think and they became one of my favourite acts in Limerick, so i was really glad to be asked to join.
Were any of you involved in other musical projects before forming this band?
Autumn: The other lads much moreso than me, I’ve released a sparse amount of material under the name Fomhar and played in the live iteration of Evan’s psychy Martian Subculture years back.
Darragh: A few years ago I was in a band called Detention. it wasn’t great, as most bands are when you’re 17, but after that broke up I just focused on my own music until I was asked to join Some Images of Paradise. Around the the same time I started practicing with SIOP I had formed my own project called Blusher with some college friends.
Kevin: I release music under Deep Route Gardening incredibly rarely and Evan does a lot of work with Martian Subculture, where myself and Autumn played in the live band some years ago.
Evan: I have Martian Subculture as a personal project and recruiting Kevin and Autumn as part of the live rendition of that has definitely contributed towards the involvement and creative chemistry here.
What’s the alternative music scene like in Limerick?
Evan: There’s naturally only an alterative scene just due to how local things are here, theres probably more “alterative” acts than artists trying to break into the mainstream, and that grassroots inspiration is class to be around. And yeah, lately there’s been a big desire from everyone in the scene to help eachother out and help everyone grow.
Autumn: It’s small but incredibly varied, you’ve got abstract rappers like Citrus Fresh to the ethereal screamo stylings of Girlfriend. It can be strange to navigate a scene where everyone knows everyone but it leads to a really organic relationship between all the artists, people really want to see the scene grow and are happy to put the work in to help a contemporary out, half the people organising shows are artists themselves and more than half of the people going to shows are artists aswell haha.
Your sound is really balanced, surprising and powerful. Tell us a bit about your songwriting process.
Autumn: I think so much of it is just based on feeling and respecting yourself and subject matter, its often a sort of frankensteining process of taking something I wrote and finding its place within an instrumental that may come about months later. Its rare that I bring something finished in, its always an idea I want to leave open to change or even want to fully find itself through the recording/production process. It takes a while for us, we’re quite patient with writing new material and the point we consider something “finished” doesn’t happen til everyone feels right.
Kevin: Autumn originally came with a lot of songs that we thought were really great, but it’s stil been quite a collaborative process in terms of the structure and sound. Sometimes they’ll have all the parts worked out, other times not and we all go to work on crafting it into a finished product.
The lyrical themes on your debut EP are quite intense, dealing with religion, self-abuse, and mental illness. What inspired you to tackle these subjects?
Autumn: I think you should always be writing from yourself for yourself. I suffer from OCD and so issues like scrupulosity and self-injury are sadly a part of my experience, thats not to say it wasn’t an active choice to confront these things, I find a lot of my writing process is learning to deal with and process these subjects through discussing them in art.
A lot of the time I’m almost throwing words and phrases at a wall til they strike me, what may feel random or like hamstrung flowery language when its first written can feel so expressive when you return to it. I think since I’m often chasing that subconscious writing style the things that plague me or interest me most will always become the most consistent, the moment I try to write about something precisely it feels unnatural, what feels honest to me is just letting the words fall out as they come to mind and processing them later.
Becoming comfortable with being that vulnerable is always a tricky thing of course, I can just only hope that if someone has gone through similar complexes they can find some comfort in what I write.
Could you provide some insights or commentary on each track from the EP, or at least on a few selected ones? It would be great to understand the stories behind them.
There Used To Be A Carpet Here
Autumn: There Used To Be A Carpet Here is an oddball, its so brash and demanding and I think it came from a sense of desperation I’d reached in my queer identity and the effect being trans has on your relationship to both family and the world around you. It was one of those ones that I didn’t write with a guitar in front of me or anything, I just wrote it in a panic at work feeling that need to get it off my chest. Theres so many different iterations of the lyrics, I remember digging up all these shoddily torn A5 sheets following that same vocal rhythm and pacing, I can’t even remember choosing the ones we inevitably settled for I just remember having to ditch a line that said “a murmur at the alter” and being upset about it haha.
That song sounded so different the first time we’d experimented with it, when it was basically just me and Evan testing the waters on the first session. At a certain stage it was sort of unspokenly agreed that it had to be deranged, it almost went from being about my gender dysphoria to trying to capture it, taking cues from experimental hip hop style tag processes like Cartier God uses and even what Jane Remover used to do in her Dariacore mixes.
It was the last one to be recorded, I feel like it was best we’d built up that “no idea is stupid, everything goes” relationship before doing it so we could all just pitch what out loud feels like nonsense but in context feels so natural.
Winter
Autumn: Winters a very guilt ridden track, the lyrics are sort of me mocking myself in retrospect, even building this character I view as all my worst qualities, but I think it really defined our identity and only felt appropriate to feature the Jonas Mekas tag and make our debut single. It felt like such a blank canvas before we’d gone about recording it, like an industrial quality mannequin without any clothes on, finding the colour in how sluggishly it trails along was like chasing that fleeting beauty.
Of all the songs we put on the ep I think that was easily the one the most hours went into, it just took so long to make feel right. We had our good friend Sallyann do backing vocals on it as well to add that hushed out tone, would love to collaborate with more artists going forward, it’s an intimate thing to bring an outsider into that home studio and share our process, going between hyper-fixating on a specific sound for hours on end to constant smoke breaks and sleep deprived inside jokes.
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All The Places You’ll Never Be
Autumn: All The Places You’ll Never Be is a funny one, it was written the night before our first show cause we needed to fill time but it just had such an immediate sense of magic in it, something about the groove and pace just felt so right but fulfilling it in recording was a different task. We wanted it to be crisp, bittersweet to taste but so sugary in appearance.
The lyrics are all about using romance and relationships to escape yourself, using another person to completely mask individual struggles and project them onto someone else, the desperation to go full self-sabotage and lose it all against the opposite need to maintain the relationship for the sake of upholding that fragile ego.
Using that vocal effect was a great experience, It’s funny how gender affirming things like that can be, just getting lost in the timbre of your own voice even though it sounds like someone elses. So many people think its Sallyann when I tell them shes on the record haha, can only take it as a compliment!
We’re planning to rework the song slightly for a single release, I’d always intended to slow it down but it just didn’t suit the pace of the ep once all was said and done, it just has such a lullaby effect when given that extra space.
Kevin: Autumn came with a loose structure for this the day before our very first gig because we didn’t have enough songs. I ended up coming up with the baseline and Evan found the perfect groove and it came about really naturally from there. Despite how quickly it came together we spent a lot of time honing the sound for the EP and it’s definitely one of my favourite tracks of the project..
Weight of the Soul
Autumn: Weight of the Soul is admittedly difficult to talk about for me, it’s my grieving process. Its trying to grapple with the idea of interacting with an afterlife beyond human comprehension, wanting to reconnect with a loved one after they’ve passed and feeling the limitations of your own body. It was so cathartic to record, so much of the process of making the ep just gave me that opportunity to feel validated in my emotions and I find that with the Weight of the Soul and Paschal Lamb especially.
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Paschal Lamb
Autumn: Paschal Lamb was the first song we recorded for the ep, a part of that is that naturally it was recorded the same way it was written. It came from a different project Evan and I were experimenting with and just fell into place so quickly, we were both in extremely complicated circumstances at the time mentally and just had so much to express.
Once we’d created that loop from just the two samples alone I remember us sitting there for ages feeling like we could just listen to that forever, and being pushed to tears when we discovered the spoken word we dug up from an old YouTube video called “My Confession”. Theres something to be said about the way people used to interact with the camera, its so candid and sincere.
I love the collage approach of building something new and personal from others material, there wasn’t even a trial-and-error approach when stacking the samples, sometimes you get to stumble upon something beautiful by sheer chance of imagination.
Evan: Yeah I think it was a really weird transitional time for both of us, and is a good example of the songwriting process just blindly following emotions and improvising, then taking a step back and realising that we just made something that speaks to us in ways we never would’ve reached consciously.
The cover art for your EP is quite dark and evocative, blending artistic and religious imagery. Can you tell us more about the concept behind it?
Autumn: The cover was done by the brilliant @ghxxstr43v3r. It came from this idea of Judas never betraying Jesus, and rather just enacting Gods will. Jesus had to die for our sins as He was always meant to but what becomes of Him if that isn’t carried out by a third party?
That image of Jesus nailing Himself into the cross is something I became obsessed with in my mind, you can almost view His death as self harm at a divine scale, even in that moment where He yells “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, that even in the certainty of an afterlife, He still fears death and detaches Himself from the holy trinity. Its so humanising. The name came from a quote I misremembered from Serial Experiments Lain, the themes of ego suicide and creating a personality separate to yourself have meant so much to me since I saw it a few years ago.
What are your plans for live shows? Any upcoming gigs or tours we should know about?
Autumn: We’re dying to play more and just trying to get in contact with as many people as possible right now, at the moment we don’t have many shows lined up but will be supporting Sweets in Dolans Warehouse on the 27th of July and should have more to announce soon!
Kevin: We have many more planned so keep an eye out!
As a DIY band, what have been some of the biggest challenges and rewards of doing everything in-house?
Kevin: The hardest part of doing everything in house is that everything is done on house haha. Spending countless hours together listening to what we had recorded, floating ideas of how to accomplish the sound we wanted and having some rare disagreements about certain parts that we always managed to find a compromise on. Doing everything in house really just means multiplying the work load a lot, but I prefer it as we achieve exactly what we want, even if it can take quite a while
Evan: Yeah recording this was such a validating and a renewable process. There are a whole lot of preconceptions of how to “properly” record music, as if it is a craft more than a fine art form, and it’s great to just stick to our guns in terms of sculpting each song as it speaks to our emotions and end up with a finished product that we love. And then some other people end up liking it too which is a huge bonus
Autumn: It’s an intense process, I wouldn’t change a thing but it is truly a test of endurance and passion, at a certain point we were doing 2 all nighters a week and that’s not even taking into account the shows and practice sessions we were doing in between. It was essential to maintain full creative control, we always knew how different these songs would sound once we’d recorded them as we weren’t just trying to emulate the live experience, it’s funny to hold that image of being a band and yet my mental image of us is stuffed around a laptop at 4am running on nothing but caffeine and a love for the art.
It’s a lot of troubleshooting, a professional engineer definitely could’ve answered questions and problems we were having within minutes as opposed to the 5 hours we might have spent trying to fix something instead, but that learning process is all a part of it and makes you feel so connected to what you’ve made.
I love listening to the ep and knowing that it was all us, it makes it so intimate, a time capsule of all that time I got to spend with some of my best friends just pitching a snare this way or that way.
