Bailing up all of their fury, disappointment, and dejection into a tightly wound ball of barbed wire come Dublin and Edinburgh based punk band V98 (vee-ninety-eight). On “Conversation Killer”, the band announce themselves in gloriously abrasive fashion with the first taste of their debut EP, PRESSGANG.
All of that anger and passion have to be vented somewhere, and on “Conversation Killer”, V98 channel it into a kinetic wall of gnashing guitars, rumbling bass, and pounding drums. The song follows a character seemingly set on a collision course with everything and everyone. Opening with a furiously hostile shout of “I’ll get a fucking job when I wanna get a job”, the song is an ode to anyone simply trying to exist in a society that couldn’t give two shits. In his weary, conversational style, lead singer Darragh Geoghegan walks us through the character’s apathy, resignation, and bitterness. As the band explains, it was a fairly easy character to conjure up.
“The character in the song is an amalgam of some of the less glorious aspects of each of our lives – we all have our own verse in there,” guitarist Conor Healy explains. “All the time he’s flitting back and forth from despair to rage, as he faces the prospect of going out to an unfamiliar social event and feeling inferior.”
Soon, the track crashes headlong into a chorus as if the band are in a mad, desperate rush to capture its power before the whole thing disintegrates completely. Backed by ripping guitars and thumping percussion, Geoghegan spits out every spit-flecked word as if his very life depended on it. In three minutes and 28 seconds, V98 manages to wrestle the ferocious spirit of punk rock and roughly hammer it into their own shape.