Dream Boy’s guide to the best hangout spots in Dublin
Posted On
“Dublin in the rain is mine, a pregnant city with a Catholic mind,” Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC sang famously on the 2019 Mercury-Prize nominated album Dogrel. Impressions of pebble-dash walls and mescaline alleyways under a thick, gloomy sky paint Dublin as the perfectly melancholic space conjured in fiery Irish aptitude.
As Far Out wrote recently, Dublin is enjoying a moment—driven, in part, as a response to the incumbent hardships that come with the city’s sadly portentious housing crisis. Even the celebrated is flavoured in crisis.
But famous wordsmith James Joyce once wrote, beautifully as ever: “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
They may not have the lengthy novelistic history behind them. Still, newcomers Dream Boy, the best and brightest of the recent Irish shoegaze revival heralded by Galway’s fierce outfit NewDad, are here to crack open the heart of the capital. The band, consisting of Allie Ryan on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Lola Coady on backing vocals and bass, Sean Hillard on lead guitar and Robyn Tywford on drums, blends dream pop into their distorted mix, conjuring both the cinematic and the breathlessly personal.
They exclusively lift the curtain for Far Out to reveal exactly where the infamous Dublin music scene puts away the amps and picks up an ice cream cone. From the secret walls of an old bookshop to the buzzing mulled wine joint tucked in the fold of a neighbourhood, get the low-down on a beloved city in new bloom.
