HAVVK

2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the first single from the Dublin-based alternative rock duo HAVVK, “Once Told.” The project was formed after the singer-songwriter Julie Hough began working with musician and producer Matt Harris. With both parties possessing versatile skills and interests, they concede that there were some initial growing pains as they discovered how their project’s sound would be defined.

“The first time we did Ireland Music Week, the feedback we got from the music industry was, ‘What is it you do?!’,” remembers Matt. “Because we had folk songs, we had post-rock, dark grunge in that set, and, looking back on it, it was nuts. We liked all those songs, but they were so different that there could have been four different bands playing in that set. So, we have had to build a little bit of a cage around it to stop it from being everything.”

Once they settled on a direction, HAVVK would be defined by desperately-breathy, dark, loud-chorus/quiet-verse, riot grrrl-influenced instrumentation layered beneath atmospherically bleak backmasking, resulting in a disquieting, perturbed gothic but euphonically melodic sound. But with their fourth album, Time Will Kill, just around the corner, fans may be surprised that the mood has lightened slightly. This is not to imply that it is a placid, easy-listening record, as attested to by the four-song teaser they released as the Pick Your Poison EP in May, but the album does diverge from the formula more than any previous release.

Julie somewhat credits this newfound freedom to the work she has done for her alt-pop project PostLast. “[HAVVK] by itself has evolved so much, sonically,” she says. “We’ve always wanted any given album to be an exploration of some existential thing that’s been on our mind, collectively.

“It was really refreshing to have another project where that wasn’t the box we were working in. I think you just lose your constraints. If you do other projects, you realise that you’ve maybe been keeping yourself in a box. So, I definitely think that we’re more playful to explore.”

“I don’t necessarily feel that way, myself, with it,” contests Matt. “I think right from the beginning of HAVVK, I’ve had my fingers in five or six different things, and, from a production point, anyway, that’s always acted as a conduit to get my electronica, or my singer-songwriter, or my ambient, or grunge, or whatever it is that we weren’t doing, out of my system. “I’ve always had ways of doing that, which has meant that HAVVK being what it was, was fun. Of all the things I’ve done, HAVVK is the one that’s most personal to me. Whenever I come back to HAVVK, I feel like it’s easy to settle into, whereas if I work on other projects, I have a week of being rubbish at it before it turns into anything good.”

When it comes to their other work, both Julie and Matt are involved with their independent label Veta Records. Additionally, Matt works as a producer for artists like Maria Kelly, Sive, and DYVR, and has an experimental side project with producer Rocky O’Reilly, called The Birthday Problem. Julie is also an events organiser, and both work full-time jobs.

It was these commitments that helped the band land on a concept for their new record: The ephemerality of time. “I think it connects because we expanded in a number of projects, and we were having a lot of conversations about, ‘Where do we find the time and what does this build towards, in terms of our time on Earth?’” laughs Julie. “‘What is the goal, here?!’ While trying to prioritise around our lives, we found this was a point that we kept coming back to.”

“I think, theme-wise, we had this ‘running out of time’ and general perspective on time in our head, as a topic to look at,” adds Matt. “And, musically, we had been talking a lot about direct lyrics and saying what you mean, rather than being metaphorical and moving around.”

Now a three-piece, featuring the drumming talents of Nigel Kenny, who is formerly of the late/great post-punk trio Bitch Falcon, we wrapped by asking how HAVVK feels in terms of their priorities within their busy schedules.

“I think it is a priority, but it’s definitely one of many,” responds Julie. “I think, maybe, that’s what we’ve had to realise, in terms of how we pace things and manage things, because between the label, Matt’s Birthday Problem project, other production projects, PostLast, HAVVK…and we’re also trying to build a studio! [Laughs] We’re kind of dictating how we fit HAVVK in around all of those projects. But, yeah, definitely a priority.

“A nice thing to realise is that this is something that we’ve been building for so long, and we can really dictate how that slots in around all our other creative projects, because, apparently, we don’t know how to stop. [Laughs]”

“I would say it’s probably at the epicenter of everything we do,” says Matt. “Because whether you’re talking about the label that grew out of what we were doing with Julie’s solo project from the beginning, and then we’ve collaborated on a lot of the stuff that Veta has done, and HAVVK has been at the vanguard of us getting to know the music industry, in the sense that Maria Kelly as a project, a lot of the things that we did in the first year of that is things we’ve done over the first two-to-three years of HAVVK, and we only knew how to do those things because we did them with HAVVK. So, we always steal from HAVVK, so that’s always the first one.”

HAVVK’s latest album, Time Will Kill, is out on June 19th. They will perform with Cable Boy at the Róisín Dubh, Galway, on July 2nd and at Anseo, Dublin, on July 16th. Tickets for both of those shows can be found at linktree.com/havvkmusic.