Photo Credits: Christopher McDonnell
Gothic undertones, literary references, and a kind of raw vulnerability that feels both haunted and healing.
From early influences that shaped their sonic palette to the gothic literature that fuels their lyrical depth, Therapy Horse let us into their world and this is what the Cork-trio had to say.
We would like to start out by hearing a little about yourselves and the band.If you overheard someone in a pub talking about Therapy Horse, what would they be saying?
Cormac Donovan O’Neill: They sound awful, but in a good way. Yerman can’t play guitar at all, sure he’s just beating it off the ground.
Emily Dollery: At least once, per every gig we play, someone will come up to us and say “Ye are loud” or “I am scared”, so maybe “They were loud, and scary”.
How did the name “Therapy Horse” come around?
Emily: I remember sometime in 2024 I was talking to Cormac about how he keeps me calm and grounded, like a therapy horse. I think I had that in the back of my mind because there is an equine therapy place about two minutes from my home in West Limerick. We had already started writing together by then so it was a moment of, wait, I love that as a band name, let’s ditch all of our other ideas and use that.
What is one unexpected influence, musical or otherwise, that helped shape the band’s identity?
Cormac: It’s quite a funny influence to cite considering how we’re very much on the other extreme of volume from this genre, but ambient music - the likes of Brian Eno’s work with Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, Éliane Radigue and Sarah Davachi are all huge for me - is a massive musical inspiration in terms of my guitar playing in Therapy Horse. A lot of the care for texture and timbre that those artists demonstrate within their music inspires my approach to the guitar; it’s probably most apparent on the intro to ‘LOVE / MERCY’ and the end of ‘LET ME BE CLEAR’ in terms of the tracks we’ve released so far, but that’s certainly an unexpected musical influence. Poetry also plays a big role in our lyric writing - Insomnia’s Gates by James Waller, who’s based in Clonakilty, has really been doing it for me lately.
Emily: There are a few much heavier (and conversely, much softer) artists who’ve inspired my writing. When we started writing music, we initially had acts like Big Thief and Wednesday in mind, and I definitely feel those lyric-forward artists as an influence now. I also really enjoy acts like Mamaleek, Lingua Ignota, Chelsea Wolfe and Brutus, general chin-stroking metal. I’d love to channel even a fraction of the raw emotion with which they deliver their music.
If you could collaborate with any artist, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
Cormac: Dead - I’d say Sonny Sharrock, the American avant-garde jazz guitarist. He has a musical journey that’s absolutely gas, going from playing with Herbie Mann and Pharoah Sanders to working with an insane cast of people in and around the New York no-wave/improvisation scene like Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Derek Bailey and Peter Brotzmann. I feel like we’d get on musically. Alive, there are so many class artists working in Ireland, so you don’t really have to go very far. Natalia Beylis’s sound art work is always really wonderful and unpredictable, she’d be brilliant to work with. We also recently played a gig with Skinner, from Dublin - we’d a lovely time and we’ve a bit of musical DNA in common. That’d be fun.
Emily: HEALTH do some really cool work with a fairly unexpected palette of artists. I really loved DISCO4 :: PART 1 when it came out in 2020, and how they managed to make collaborations with 100gecs, Xiu Xiu and Soccer Mommy somehow all work really well on the same album. I feel like they’d work well with what we do as it’s all so dark and cool.
Your latest single LOVE / MERCY draws from gothic literature, which we absolutely adore. If Therapy Horse (or you individually) were a character in a gothic novel, what would your arc be? Tragic hero, monstrous outsider, or something else entirely?
Cormac: I’d be the lad in Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, but the constant and maddening heartbeat is the urge to get another reverb pedal.
Emily: As a band, we’d probably be the monstrous outsider. Not in an edgy way, just that sometimes in green rooms I feel like we’re the weirdos in the corner. Individually, maybe some contemporary American Gothic desolate madwoman. Sometimes I do feel like Pearl, from Pearl (2022) onstage. Please, I’m a star.
Themes like desperation, self-annihilation, and sacrifice run deep in your lyrics. What draws you to explore these darker emotional landscapes?
Cormac: I think - speaking for myself anyway - we’re all quite emotional people in the band, on some level, and even from the earliest days of Therapy Horse from which ‘LOVE / MERCY’ emerged in jams, we’ve all noted specifically that playing this music is very cathartic. We’re definitely not the first people to say it, but expelling those kinds of emotions at very high volumes backed by a massive wall of noise is about as much of a release as one can possibly ask for, which is a wonderful thing.
Emily: I honestly think this music, and playing these gigs, keeps me relatively mellow. Some songs, like LET ME BE CLEAR, definitely draw upon my own feelings, frustrations and experiences, while others take inspiration from other, similarly wallowy artists or from various morbid texts. I don’t think I’ll ever shake off my teenage angst, and I definitely feel the darker lyrics and sounds of the artists I loved then–your Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, and what have you–in the way I approach making music now.
If ‘LOVE / MERCY’ were reimagined as a visual artwork or film, what would it look like?
Cormac: The Elephant Man, by David Lynch. Or one of the fairly bleak ones that Rothko painted in the latter phase of career. He’d one called Black in Deep Red, I think from 1957. That gives Therapy Horse, as the kids say.
Emily: Tracey Emin’s The End of Love. The whole exhibition it featured in is so devastating and raw.
Finally, what’s next for Therapy Horse? Is there anything you’re allowed to share about upcoming releases, shows, or projects?
Cormac: Lots more recording, for definite - we have a lot of songs written and are fairly good at putting them together during rehearsals and jams, so we just need to lay some more down. An EP early next year would be a goal definitely, as well as getting over to the UK. We have two dates with a brilliant Limerick band called The Low Field in Dolan’s Kasbah October 26th, then in Anseo in Dublin October 30th; after that, we’re playing in the Grand Social with a class noisy band called SLYRYDES in Dublin November 20th.
M. Müller & M. Ernst, 2025