Liberties Uncovered – Milk

The vibrant Liberties area of Dublin 8 is a culturally rich hub for budding new artists and musicians. With both NCAD and BIMM being located at its core, it’s no wonder that creative talent is oozing from its seams. The Liberty have decided to showcase these talents by doing occasional entries into our new ‘Liberties Uncovered’ series.

One such band that has recently arrived onto Dublin’s music scene is four-piece group Milk, which consists of Mark McKenna, Conor Gorman, Morgan Wilson and Conor King.

McKenna told the Liberty about how the band was formed: “Me and Conor started making music around two years ago. We eventually decided to get more people involved to push the process along, and suddenly all these songs we had written started to come to life.”

They are currently situating themselves at the top of the unwritten ‘ones to watch’ list emerging from the capital, assisted greatly by the debut of their fantastic new single, ‘Drama Queen’.

“‘Drama Queen’ started off as a punk tune,” McKenna says. “Then Gormy [Conor Gorman] took the bass tune and slowed it down, and it became Drama Queen. We then passed it on to Adam and he turned it into an eight-armed beast.”

Having a collective appreciation of bands such as The Japanese House and The 1975 creates a natural indie-pop influence for the band’s music. The coherence from this is enhanced by elements of electronic, rock, r’n’b, and ‘80s music that appear in their tracks too.

Drummer Morgan Wilson expands on the artistic origins of what they are currently producing: “I’m into more ambient music, Brian Eno that sort of thing, just because I think that’s where a lot of the interesting futuristic-sounding production is to be found. I think it has a lot to offer even if you make music like ours. And we are definitely heavily inspired by electronic acts as well.”

The Liberty wanted to know how that striking name came about. McKenna says: “Milk comes from the movie A Clockwork Orange. The character Alex drinks a lot of milk but it is laced with drugs. It’s that whole idea of something that can seem so innocent. That the whole world of drugs and violence almost seems as prevalent to our lives as a glass of milk is to a child.”

The band are continuing to gain traction, with plans to release new music very soon. Wilson tells the Liberty: “We’re gonna record a tune called ‘Temperature’ next and put that out before the summer. Then we want to have an EP out before the end of the year.”

Although the music industry is now dominated by online streaming and downloads, the guys from Milk are old-school. “We like the idea of having something tangible, we take a lot of pictures while we’re recording as well,” McKenna explains.  “We’d like to do a release for the EP and hopefully get physical copies for it too. We think it’d be cool if we could get a photo-book that comes with the EP but only if you buy a physical copy.”