MacD on Music: Employee of the Month

In the ‘90s, Seattle was at the heart of one of the most influential movements this side of the Beatles: Grunge. Groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden were leading a musical revolution whose impact can still be felt today.

This week, I’m going to be talking to Seos Martin, frontman of Shasma and the man making sure that grunge is alive and well in Derry for the foreseeable future. Shasma have just released their debut album ‘in consequence’, which had its launch gig in Bennigan’s this past Friday. I caught up with Seos recently to discuss the band and the album.

We began with the origins of the group: “I go it into my head that I had enough songs to record an EP and having tried recording in my shed for a bit, I realised I should really get somebody with better gear. I did what turned out to be an album with Brian McMonagle [of Beechwood Recording] and then realised I needed a band to perform it live.

"There’s no point of me going out with an acoustic guitar and having the album sounding the way it sounded.”

“Derry being full of musicians, and, having gotten to know plenty over the years, I was able to ask everybody I knew, and after a couple of months I found James Dunn, the bassist, and we played our first gig with Music Capital up in the Nerve Centre in 2022 and met the drummer that night. He was working for Music Capital on the door, so Nathan Walker gave me a few minutes of his time and turned up for practice a few days later.

"It took a bit of time, but I had set my goal of finding a metal bassist and a punk drummer and I found it in both of them. I’m still buzzing.”

“So far [the songs]we have had playlisting from Chordblossom, Hot Press, Roddie Cleere and Merryn Music. Because we’ve been gigging for two years now, a lot of the songs that we play live are on the album. That was my intention, rather than a lot of bands who put out an album and it’s a bunch of fresh songs that people haven’t heard before. My intention was to let people get to know the songs first, so they know what they’re getting when they get the album.”

“This album’s been so long in the making. It was started two weeks before Lockdown in 2020. I got a couple of sessions with Brian, then obviously Lockdown delayed the whole thing. I’ve been dying to jump into songwriting again. I’ve been doing bits and pieces, but not really focusing on it the way that I want, because it takes so much to finish the album and trying to book gigs and just keeping things running the way I’ve been doing it.

"It’s been taking up so much of my time leading up to the album launch that I’ve not really taken the time that I need to write songs and look at what else I want to do with music. I love the grungy sound I’ve had at heart through all the music I’ve written over the years.

"The album is kind of the collection of the best of those sounds. I like the idea of changing it up a bit, but with this line-up, given that I chose a metal bassist and a punk drummer, it’s going to be interesting to see where that new sound will go. Logically, it should really go heavier but I like the idea of mixing it up with some softer stuff as well.

"We’ve been playing around in the practice room with bits and pieces of things that I’ve not finished over the years and some of those are softer. I like to think we’re going to do a bit of both with whatever comes next, be it an EP or and album or just a bunch of singles, there’ll be a variety of soft and heavy in there.”

READ MORE: MacD on Music

“Our first EP had an overall kind of grungy sound to it, and I always had it in my head that that collection of songs would’ve been part of an album. Songs that would’ve accompanied them on an album got lost over the years when I wrote better songs and that’s what became the album.

"I’ve got soft songs in me, and I’ve got some stuff that has yet to be completed, but it all depends on what we’ve currently got when we’ve got the funding to do the recording. I could tell you the handful of songs that I have in my head for the next release but if better songs come then they’ll be forgotten about.”

And that’s it from Seos. Shashma’s debut album ‘in consequence’ is available now on all good streaming services, Bandcamp and in Cool Discs. They can be found on Instagram @shasma.music.