OTwo Co-Editor Orla Mahon sits down with Lara Minchin, lead vocalist and guitarist of Adore, an up and coming Irish trio
There are countless aspects to Adore that make the three-piece band striking. Their impeccable work ethic has brought them to play gigs ranging from Electric Picnic, to open mic nights in Galway, to performing on a boat in Rotterdam. Their music style refuses to be restricted to any one genre, and their cohesion as a unit allows them to constantly experiment and still sound insane. And yet, what caught my attention most when I sat down with Lara Minchin, Adore's lead vocalist and guitarist, was the gentle heart and earnest nature of the band. The band's Instagram bio - "we're gonna save rock and roll," - is evidently a tongue-in-cheek statement, but I'm inclined to believe that if anyone can revitalise the Irish music industry, with its often shady business practices and chronic mistreatment of female artists, Adore are up to the task. Their latest single, Can We Talk, was released on November 13th.
When I ask Lara about the band’s upcoming headliner in Whelan’s, her excitement is palpable. The band had initially agreed to play the upstairs venue of Whelan’s, yet upon selling it out quickly, they were upgraded to the main venue. “When I was a teenager, I’d see my favourite bands in Whelan’s main room,” Lara says, describing the surreality of the experience. “That’s doing something for the fifteen year old me.” A headline gig of this size is something the band has been preparing themselves for, and only wanted to tackle once they felt like they were ready for it. “We were really pacing ourselves, and trying to only do a large headline show if we thought there’d be enough people there for it. We didn’t want the pressure of trying to sell ourselves.” Adore has a strong history with Whelan’s, as their upstairs venue was the first gig that the band played in Dublin, accompanied by Sheerbuzz and Cardinals. “It is a very full circle moment,” Lara laughs, “and it’s nice that it’s in December, because it’s closing off the year of work that we’ve done.”
Adore has definitely put in the work to get to where they are today - countless hours of practice, endless time spent on public transport, and performing across the country. When the band started out in 2022, they adopted a habit of taking whatever gig they could get their hands on. “We’d just play as much as we could to get the word out and to get practice - because I think the best practice you can get is actually playing the show.” Yet while this level of dedication and commitment is admirable, it was difficult to balance the band and everything else alongside it. Lara and Lachlann, the band’s bassist, are both college students, with Lara studying archeology and English at UCD, and Lachlann studying psychology and media through Irish at the University of Galway. Naoise, the band’s drummer, is also based in Galway. “When we were starting out first, I was in my first year of college at UCD [...] I would go over to Galway every weekend for practice, and try to do all my assignments, and try and finish them on the bus over to Galway.” In contrast to many musicians, who place value in suffering for their craft, Lara doesn’t want to glorify this type of behaviour.
She recognises that it can have harmful impacts on both one’s physical and mental health. “I definitely burnt the candle at both ends,” Lara says. “It’s hard to find the balance between life and band, but I’ve tried to figure that out.”
Lara feels incredibly grateful for the band’s manger, Lewis, who has been a wonderful support. Lewis signed on with the band in the last year, and has encouraged Adore to focus on gigs that they find fulfilling. “His main fear is burn out. So we’ve just been trying to play more shows that we are excited about, or supporting people who we admire.” Lara briefly touches upon how she has found Lewis to be deeply understanding of each of the band member’s unique situations. “When I was ill, he was saying, ‘Well, what can we do without moving you? What sort of stuff can we work on without you having to go anywhere or having to exert any energy whatsoever?’ [...] He’s just a wonderful guy.”
One of the band’s major focuses is on avoiding burnout and staying healthy. For Lara, this involves choosing not to drink. “I don't drink, and I try to keep myself very well in other ways, because the one thing I can't control is the fact that the nature of the job is at night time, and it requires a lot of travel. So you try to control the other bits around it, to keep yourself well.” This is against many of the romanticised notions of what people believe defines a rock band. “It's cool to be able to burn at both ends, and to fall into a bus and go from place to place. But it's something that I can't do . . . I do what I can to make this a sustainable career option, as opposed to completely burning myself out. It’s a weird one, because you do feel like a bit of a dweeb,” Lara laughs. And yet, she has a very punk-ish attitude in what other people may think of her choices. “If you don't care what other people are thinking, it's easy.”
When I ask Lara what niche she thinks the band falls into, she laughs. “Like I’ve always said, Adore is for the girls and the gays. And that covers more than just the girls and the gays!”
On a more serious note, Lara believes in being authentic to herself and the band, and believes that music has the power to encourage others to do the same. “Adore is queer-forward, female forward,” Lara says, “This is who I’m writing for . . . I’m not trying to water that down for a larger audience.” One of Adore’s frequent collaborators, the female-lead band Sprints, is similar in this way. “I think the niche we fall into is just the concept of loud women. We seem to get paired up with Sprints a lot, and Carla from Sprints is amazing, and she’s a loud woman. And no one fears anything more than that.” Lara also places a heavy emphasis on the ability that music has to bring people of different backgrounds together, and embraces this. “Some people who listen to us, they listen to lots of different things. It's not all just people who listen to punk, or all people who listen to garage or heavier stuff. Everyone's very different. Our crowds always look really like all kinds of people which I love. There's not a uniform, and it's really nice, just a huge room of freaks, and they're all completely different. And I love that to bits.”
So how did the band come about? “You know Adore Delano, the drag queen?” Lara laughs. “I couldn’t write music for a while after the last band, and I felt like I needed a name before I could start writing . . . Once I had the word adore, I was like, fuck yeah, it’s all fine now, writer’s block is gone.” Lara knew Naoise from previously playing in a band with him when she was a teenager, and she had met Lachlann while playing at a music festival in Derry. After taking a break from music, Lara got in contact with the pair. “Lachlann said he was going to college in Galway, and I was like, I know who lives in Galway! So I took Naoise and Lachlann out for a pint together in Galway, and they hit it off . . . And that's how it came to be.” However, Naoise and Lachlann weren’t aware of the origin of the band name until after they had begun performing together. “I remember the lads, like they're two lovely straight men, and someone asked, where’s the band name come from? And I said, do you know Adore Delano the drag queen? They're like, what!”
When Adore started out first, the initial goal of the project was simply to make music and have fun doing it. “The band’s goal, for me, was just to get back into music,” Lara says. “I didn’t want to be afraid of the scene that I’d kind of disappeared from . . . I just wanted to enjoy making music again.” Lara mentions the impact of the pandemic on the Irish music scene, and believes that it allowed many musicians to start fresh, and begin creating a new scene from scratch. “A lot of bands dissolved over lockdown. When we came back, it was like a brand new scene. And we could all start building it up again . . . It was nice being able to start new, with these two lovely guys who I love to bits, who I trust, and I knew that we would look after each other.”
This simple goal - “to just have fun, as cliche as it sounds” - has guided Adore throughout the band’s career, and perhaps it is this earnest mantra that has kept the band grounded despite all their achievements. “We don’t look very far into the future with these things, because it’s unpredictable and I’m doing far more than I expected when I was a teenager,” says Lara. “But I don't think any of us expected the band to do so well. Or for people to get it. When you're making music, it doesn't feel like you're making music. It feels like you're making something up. It doesn't feel like you're doing something legit, ever. So it's weird when people treat us like something proper.”
Lara was in a previous band, GIF, prior to forming Adore, but her experience in performing didn’t begin there. “I was in the RTÉ Cór na nÓg when I was a kid!” Following this, Lara began playing in various bands throughout her teenage years. Yet it was GIF that began attracting attention. “GIF was the first proper band I was in,” Lara says. “It got noticed, and people came to the shows, and it all felt kind of grown up.” Lara describes her time in this band as a stark introduction to the realities of the music industry. “GIF was great, because it showed me what was normal and what wasn’t normal in the industry . . . It gave me a good crash course in how to be treated.” This experience, Lara believes, has been invaluable, both in shaping her as a musician and strengthening Adore as a band. “I know what I'm worth. I know how we should be treated. I know how these things go down. I know what's dodgy, and I know what's safe.” Starting out so young, and having the freedom to learn from their mistakes, has kept the band humble and thankful for their current success. “The amount of times I played to a room with like, four people there, because we booked a stupid gig . . . It’s so important not to have that sort of self-importance. I never want to be too big for my boots.”
Adore are embarking upon a tour across the UK, supporting one of there frequent collaborators, Sprints. Earlier this year, Adore and Sprints toured together in Ireland. “We got on with them like a house on fire, like they are the most gorgeous people ever. We are so matched humour-wise, and sound-wise as well,” Lara says, reflecting on the experience. “It was the best fun ever. And I just love their music. They're one of the best live bands I've ever seen. Even if you listen to the record, and it's not your cup of tea, if you see them live, they're absolutely massive.”
“It’s a huge, huge opportunity and so exciting” Lara says about their upcoming UK tour, kicking off in Glasgow on November 28th. Yet as an independent band, Adore had to budget extensively to be able to afford the UK tour. “We’ll play a gig and be like, okay, that will give us our accommodation for a night in Bristol. Every cent that we make goes back into the band fund [...] That goes into recording, it goes into the artwork, it goes into absolutely every bit of our music. So we'd be playing gigs with the intention of, okay, this gig will go to petrol.”
Despite the stress of having to manage the financial side of things, the band appreciate the freedom that being independent has given them.
“Money wise, it is tough, and we have to be really careful about where we put our money. But it does mean we have a lot of control over what we release,” Lara says. “It's nice to have a have something out that's a hundred percent you. And all the people that you’ve been working with, you chose them, and everything was very intentional.”
The process of recording as an independent band has both its ups and downs. Lara describes the process of recording Supermum!, one of Adore’s recent releases. “We had two days to record one song,” working with Daniel Fox (of Gilla Band) as a producer. “He's great, and he's got great ideas, and he understands the sound really well . . . He had us in the studio, mixing it then afterwards, which is great, because we were all there in real time, as opposed to going back and forth on emails. It was very hands on, and a very intense two days. The first day was drum and bass, and then the second day was like, eight hours of guitar and vocals.” But despite the process being so intense, the band was delighted with how the record turned out. “It sounded exactly how it should have. It's raw enough. And it's balanced, and it sounds incredibly similar to how it does live,” Lara says. “I wouldn't want to record something that I couldn't recreate live. I would feel like I'm not doing enough for the audience. I’d feel like I was letting them down.”
Supermum! is a song that was birthed from pain and anger - discussing the topic of assault, and reflecting upon how women are socialised to maintain a polite facade in the face of such experiences. “You're raised to be quiet and obedient, and to be aware of other people's feelings, and to not cause a scene. And that's all well and good until someone takes advantage of that.” The song was inspired by the stories of countless women, and yet the incident that drove Lara to write the song was an experience she had within the music industry. “I wrote Supermum! after a music industry Christmas party. I had a few foul experiences with some of the people there who weren't artists, they were the people who were writing about the artists or taking photos of the artists. They were the people who are telling the audience what to listen to and what's good and what's not,” Lara reflects. “I had one man say something incredibly inappropriate towards me, and he was a music writer. . . . And I said to him, ‘I'm going to remember that, what you just said there.’ He got all flustered and was like, ‘oh, no, you got the wrong idea,’ and I was like, ‘no, I'm going to remember your name, and that you said that.’ . . . And it's a power thing. It's a complete power thing. Because they know that all of these people are hoping for a chance, and they're hoping for a good review, so they can't say sh*t. And then, after Supermum! released, he actually wrote a review for the song.”
Listening to music can be a healing process for many, and the band aspires to give a voice to those that may otherwise feel unheard. “Before every song we play, there's kind of a summoning of the feeling that is in the song beforehand, just so that you get the tone right, and you're able to put the emotion right when you're singing it . . . I like to play Supermum! at shows, because I just want everyone in the crowd to know that we have a zero tolerance policy [for assault], and everyone has to be looking after each other . . . I pray that it never happens. But in the world that we live in, that's almost impossible. But I just want people to feel safe, and safe enough to speak up. Because I can't stop these things from happening. In an ideal world, people will learn not to do these things, and we will teach children not to repeat these cycles. But for the time being, if people feel safe enough to speak up - that's huge,”
The band’s latest release, Can We Talk, also addresses themes that are oftentimes difficult to confront. “It’s about the cycles of abuse and control in relationships, and leaning into it from unhealed parts of yourself. In these relationships, the threat is always there, but you might not notice until things get terrifying,” Lara says. “It’s a pretty song. And it’s big, and it’s loud. It’s got an element of rage, and almost that sort of ambivalence you have after getting out of a situation like that.”
Can We Talk is available to stream as of November 13th. You can also catch Adore live in Whelan’s on the 8th of December.