GIRL Band – a Dublin-based noise rock band – have announced that they have changed their name to Gilla Band to avoid their "misgendered" band name causing offence.
The ‘post-punk’ band, made up of childhood friends Dara Kiely and Alan Duggan, as well as Daniel Fox and Adam Faulkner, said they were struggling to justify their old name considering it was an all-male group.
In a statement released on Twitter, the band said: "Regardless of our intention the effect of the name has been damaging to individuals."
They have apologised to anyone who may have been affected by their original "misgendered" band name.
We are changing our band name. We are also playing some shows in Dublin in January. pic.twitter.com/PNhZ19dL2m
— Gilla Band (@GillaBand) November 16, 2021
People took to Twitter to express their support or shock over the name change.
Ricky Boi! said: “Girl Band had to change their name?? Wait til ppl hear about Women.”
Like Girl Band, Women is an all-male Canadian art rock band, comprised of Patrick Flegel, Christopher Reimer, Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace, that has stuck with its original name.
Another user, banrion, said: “4 me... im wary of equating men calling themselves girlband with misgendering & also don't think terms like 'girlband' should be un-slaggable, always thought the point of their name was slagging how lazy n weird a term that is !! their choice tho and gilla band is a rockin name”.
Gilla Band broke into the mainstream with its Rough Trade debut, Holding Hands With Jamie, in 2015, and with the well-received follow-up, The Talkies, four years later.
Responding to criticism of the name in 2015, they told Vice, “It isn’t a super ironic thing plus we are probably the least macho people, ever. Some people probably think we are taking the piss out of girls, which we are very much against. It was like ‘Look. We’re really against what you think where we’re coming from.’ I’d really hate to think that we put any women off, or any people off.”
Gilla is the latest band to open up another frontier in the culture wars since Mumford and Sons band member Winston Marshall quit the English group after tweeting about US journalist Andy Ngo's book titled Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan To Destroy Democracy.
As the book documents the violent tactics and anti-democratic agenda of the far-left group Antifa, the Tweet was misconstrued as support for the American political far-right.
Marshall clarified that he had intended to such thing.
He Tweeted: "The tweet was misconstrued by many as an endorsement of the equally abhorrent Far-Right. Nothing could be further from the truth. I condemn unequivocally all political extremism, be it of the Right or Left."
