Meet Dublin’s newest alt‑rock apparition Merricat! Formed in early 2025, the band’s origin story is as unpretentious as it is charming. “We’re ultimately just a couple of art students who became friends through a shared interest in music,” they tell us.
Meeting through the NCAD music society in late 2024, they spent months experimenting, jamming, and letting their influences bleed into each other – DIIV, Smashing Pumpkins, Julie, Mary and the Junkyard, you name them. By the summer of 2025, something clicked. The vision crystallised and Merricat became Merricat.
The band consists of vocalist and rhythm guitarist Kelly Branagan, Kai Malone on bass, Oisin McGough on lead guitar and Joshua Hayes on the drums. Together, they build songs that feel like walking through a dream you’re not sure is entirely safe, but loving every second of it.
Their new single merrow is the band’s clearest statement yet: a shimmering, haunted meditation on isolation, misunderstanding, and the mythic creatures we turn ourselves into when the world refuses to see us clearly.
“I used a lot of sea imagery and storytelling to try to convey this feeling of isolation,” Kelly explains. The merrow – a figure from Irish folklore – became the perfect vessel. “The folklore surrounding merrows seems to be quite divided,” she says. “A lot depict them as evil creatures that lured sailors, while other stories were quite sad, telling of how they were forced to leave the sea, marry and become wives.”
That tension – monstrous or misunderstood, feared or forced – pulses through the track. The sea becomes a sanctuary, a place where the self is allowed to exist without distortion. “Using the merrow in the song, and the sea as a kind of safe space, made sense as a way of expressing that feeling of being misunderstood.”
Musically, merrow leans into Merricat’s signature dream‑spook aesthetic. Minimal lyrics drift like mist over layered guitars, each one adding a new shade of melancholy or menace. “We tried to keep the lyrics minimal to let the dreamy eeriness of the melody shine through,” Kelly says. “The instrumentals really do capture the feeling of frustration and melancholy.”
The band had a blast building the track’s atmosphere. “We had a lot of fun recording this song and layering all of the guitars to give it even more of a spooky feel,” they tell us. “It was great to see the whole track fully come together during the recording process.”
Merricat are in that thrilling early phase where everything feels possible. They’ve been writing, recording and refining their sonic world. “It feels like we’re only just getting started,” they say. With an upcoming EP leaning deeper into their eerie, ocean‑lit aesthetic and plans to play far more gigs in 2026, the band is ready to step out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage.
“We’re really excited to share what we’ve been working on,” they tell us. And honestly – so are we.
MERROW OUT NOW.
Words by
Marie Müller, 2026.