core. presents: Torche + Helms Alee | The Button Factory, Dublin | 13.09.25
Schedule
Sat Sep 13 2025 at 07:00 pm to 11:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
The Button Factory | Dublin, DN
Core. presents: Torche + Helms AleeThe Button Factory, Dublin
13.09.25
18+
Tickets on SALE NOW! https://bit.ly/44PNpYm
TORCHE
“People are always trying to figure out which compartment we fit into. They wanna put us on a shelf. But in a world of Sabbaths, we get to be Van Halen.”
That’s Torche guitarist and producer Jon Nuñez talking about his band’s uneasy relationship with categorization. Over the last 15 years, Torche—led by the core trio of Nuñez, guitarist/vocalist Steve Brooks and drummer Rick Smith—have often been saddled with one-dimensional niche terms like doom, sludge or stoner rock, but none of them really apply. “That shit is tiresome,” he says. “When people ask me what kind of music we play, I just say, ‘Loud rock n’ roll.’”
HELMS ALEE
Seattle three-piece Helms Alee has announced a new album Keep This Be The Way available April 29th via Sargent House. Across the span of their first five studio albums, the trio zeroed in on different aspects of their sound - a blend of lilting siren songs, crushing Northwest thunder and sludge, angular econo-rock, and heady guitar pop while retaining their no-frills, meat-and-potatoes approach in the studio. But with this Helms Alee expanded have their palette by delving into the production possibilities afforded by recording the album themselves, creating their most dynamic and technicolored work to date. This new approach is immediately evident on first single and album opener “See Sights Smell Smells,” where reverse cymbal crashes, fragmented piano, layered drums, woozy drones, saxophone freak-outs, and trippy vocal treatments transport the listener to an altered state of exhilarated anticipation. The song is accompanied by a video created by Allen Watke whose video art consists primarily of analog equipment with an emphasis on VHS dubbing, glitching manipulation.
When the pandemic hit, guitarist/vocalist Ben Verellen, bassist/vocalist Dana James, and drummer/vocalist Hozoji Matheson-Margullis found refuge in their music and bunkered down in a makeshift studio in Verellen’s amplifier shop. Through the remainder of 2020 and into early 2021, the band wrote an album as a distraction from the surrounding turbulence, recording songs with the assistance of Ron Harrell as they were writing them, composing the material with the added benefit of hearing them come together from the engineer’s chair. Keep This Be the Way still very much sounds like a Helms Alee record, but it’s their first album that diverts from the faithful recreation of their live sound and delves into a vibrant tapestry of surreal sounds and invented spaces.
