Up until the release of their new single, “Measly Means,” today, Villanelle had just one song on Spotify. The rock trio have never played outside of their native England with the exception of quick one-offs in Malta and Germany. They have no official timeline for their first EP, and their debut LP remains little more than a distant dream.
But they’ve already opened up for Jet and Liam Gallagher at enormous venues across the United Kingdom, and their frantic club gigs are packed with young fans who scream along to songs that haven’t even been recorded yet, and are available only via dodgy, fan-shot YouTube videos.
One reason they’ve pulled this off is because Villanelle are proud Nirvana obsessives who essentially reverse-engineered the sound of Nevermind and sprinkled a bit of Arctic Monkeys on top of it, introducing a new generation of fans to a style of music that largely vanished before they were born. “I love that Nirvana sound so much,” says Villanelle frontman Gene Gallagher. “There’s so many bands out today that I find a bit scared to be anything that’s happened before or use any sort of influence from anyone because they want to be brand-new. But I like that sound and I like using it.”
Another reason they’ve pulled this off is that Gene Gallagher is the son of Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. This has obviously opened up many doors for the band, like a support slot on the elder Gallagher’s Definitely Maybe 30th-anniversary tour in 2024. But it also raises inevitable nepo-baby accusations that are unlikely to ever vanish completely.
“There’s a lot of pros [to being the son of a rock icon],” says Gallagher. “I mean, the pros definitely outshine the cons, 100 percent. But the cons … you can’t let them get to you too much. You’ve just got to keep looking forward and pushing on and take it all in. You can channel all that energy of everyone giving a fuck, and it puts you in a pretty good position.”
As a kid growing up in England around the turn of the millennium, Gallagher was obsessed with the Beatles. When he got a little older, his mother — All Saints singer Nicole Appleton — introduced him to Nineties grunge bands. The music opened up his mind, and showed him a path forward in life. “Before I even played any instruments, I knew I’d be a musician,” he says. “And when I first played to an audience, I became addicted to it. I knew I’d do it forever.”
Villanelle was born just a couple of years ago, when Gallagher met bassist Jack Schiavo at a bar through mutual friends. After discovering a mutual love of the Beatles, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains, they started talking about forming a band. Guitarist Ben Taylor joined up with them shortly afterward when they heard about him via friends and tracked him down on Instagram. (Drummer Andrew Richmond was initially part of the band, but they parted ways with him this year. They now play live with Louis Semlekan-Faith, but technically remain a trio.)
From the beginning, they knew they wanted to emulate the sound of their favorite Nineties bands. “Any genre or style is new if you’ve not heard it before,” says Taylor. “So yes, to a degree we could say it’s bringing something back, but I think for a lot of people it’s something fresh and new, and it’s the next thing that’s going to move forward.”
After seven months of woodshedding and songwriting, they booked their first show at Troubadour in the Earl’s Court neighborhood of London. “I was nervous as anyone would be on their first gig,” says Gallagher. “I was shitting it, but I obviously had a couple beers for liquid courage. And then I enjoyed it after that.”
They played nothing but originals at that first show, and that’s a rule the’ve stuck with to this day. “We never wanted to be one of those sort of cover bands,” says Gallagher. “We just felt if no one knew our songs, we’d have to just take it on the chin.”
After a few months giggling at tiny clubs around London, they had a repertoire of songs. But they decided to hold back on releasing anything, waiting until Sept. 25 to drop “Hinge.” “All of our songs went through so many iterations,” says Schiavo. “Once it’s on record and on Spotify, that’s the final product. Holding onto them for as long as we did meant we were really happy with the end product.”
In June of 2024, the band found themselves playing to capacity crowds at 20,000-seat arenas in England on the Definitely Maybe tour. “It was very much a baptism-by-fire kind of thing,” says Schiavo. “It made us so much tighter as musicians. By the time we came off and we went back to doing clubs on our own, we were just so much more solid because we had to really grow in that moment.”
Seb Barros*
They opened up the Definitely Maybe shows with “Measly Means,” and it’s been a key part of their live show ever since. Dropping it as the second single felt like an obvious move. “It has the essence of ‘Hinge,’ but also the essence of what’s to come,” says Gallagher. “It’s a powerful, jumpy song. I want to pogo every time I hear it.”
At the moment, Villanelle have nothing on the calendar besides a round of U.K. club gigs in December. But they have big plans for 2026, including the release of their first EP in the spring, and their inaugural U.S. tour. “We are quite well-booked for things in the United States next year, all over the country,” says Schiavo. “It’s going to be a good opportunity to go out there, show our sound off, see what audience it really resonates with, and maybe which ones it doesn’t, and go from there again.”
Villanelle’s rise coincided with the Oasis reunion tour. They’ve had a lot of fun attending shows together when their schedule gives them downtime, but they’ve also dealt with endless requests for free tickets wherever they go. “We get asked all the time,” says Gallagher. “Even people that I don’t know don’t stop asking me.”
People also don’t stop comparing Villanelle to Nirvana, but that doesn’t annoy him quite as much. “People don’t seem to see the difference between ripping someone off just taking inspiration,” says Gallagher. “But I’d rather be compared to Nirvana than someone shit.”
