Listening to The Gilhoolys’ new single, “Bad Routine,” is to feel the pressure of a low, grey sky just before it breaks. There’s a muscular, unapologetic rock energy here, the kind of sound forged in rooms with sticky floors and loud histories. It moves with a bruised swagger, the ghost of Thin Lizzy hanging around the edges of a decidedly modern indie rock angst, delivered with the world-weary defiance you’d expect from a band reborn from the Glasgow 90s.
The track’s title is a wonderful piece of understatement. This isn’t about the drudgery of a morning commute. The routine Dev sings about is something heavier, something with the inescapable scent of an old tenement flat—a place where the past lingers in the very walls, a history passed down not by choice, but by occupancy. The feeling of being “stuck in the middle” of “brain dead rich kids” is delivered not just with a snarl, but with the profound exhaustion of an outsider who has been playing the part for too long. It’s a cyclical dread.
This inherited weight is the song’s central nerve. The lyric “now and forever / I’ll pass it into you” is delivered with a chilling sense of resignation, transforming personal struggle into an almost generational curse. It’s a startlingly bleak admission, one that sidesteps bravado for a far more potent vulnerability. Then the song cracks open with its final, desperate question: why carry the weight of being “a mother’s son”? Suddenly, the fight isn’t with the world, but with existence itself.
When your history is a curse you feel compelled to pass on, what does freedom even look like?
