10 Essential Rock Albums Of The 2010s

This is going to sound stupid as well as completely contradictory, but that's just how it is. Sometimes you listen to an album and don't understand one minute of it, but you still somehow 'get' exactly what it's about and what's being conveyed. That is very much the case with Holding Hands With Jamie, Girl Band's debut album.

Vocalist Dara Kieley's lyrics are completely abstract and obtuse. The clearest they ever get is on The Last Riddler, which is a verbatim exchange with his psychiatrist. The music itself is distorted, oppressive and anxiety inducing.

Say you sit down and listen to this for the first time, with no context whatsoever and yet somehow you're acutely aware that you are listening to the musical documentation of someone's mental breakdown. Well, that is precisely what this album is.

Kieley experienced a psychotic break and spent six weeks in a tent in his mother's garden. Soon after he was committed to a psychiatric ward. During his time in hospital he wrote the entirety of the lyrics for the album. The result is one of the most unsettling, unnerving and interesting albums to come out in years.