Wyvern Lingo

Wyvern Lingo has been on the Irish music scene for years. “Friends first and a band second,” Karen Cowley, Saoirse Duane and Caoimhe Barry all grew up close to each other in Bray, County Wicklow, and bonded at age 11 over similar tastes in music.

The three had siblings that played music together, all of whom were very encouraging when it came to them starting their own band. Karen’s brother inspired her to pick up the bass as well as continuing her piano lessons, and Caoimhe was influenced into buying a drum-kit with her confirmation money. From then, the trio would spend school lunchtimes rehearsing in Caoimhe’s garage, often using the classic Irish excuse of, “We forgot we left the immersion on and had to go back,” for returning late to class. Saoirse tells me that she has recently organised all of the bands early recordings, which, she says, are surprisingly good quality and could easily be repurposed. “Some of the tunes are pretty banging!” they all agree, before telling me about an old diss song they wrote. It was about a friend called Lucy, whos name for the purpose of the song was changed to Goosey. A second diss song followed referring to the girls who told Lucy about the song.

Wyvern Lingo’s lyrical content has come a long way since the “un-self-aware teenage emotion” displayed in the recordings of their garage sessions. This is especially apparent on Brutal Lottery, one of the four singles the band has released this year ahead of their second album. The song was written four years ago, and recorded last year here in Berlin. It is a raw and powerful ballad, calling out the “blissful apathy” of many to the plight of the tens of thousands of refugee children that have “slipped into the cracks.” The threesome chose to finally release the track in the late summer of this year, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement that was sweeping the globe. Karen explains that it just felt right to release Brutal Lottery at this time, because, “Like with Black Lives Matter, a huge part of the refugee crisis is structural racism.” All proceeds went towards the Belgian organisation, Missing Children Europe.

This is not the first time Wyvern Lingo have actively contributed to social and political causes; I remember seeing them play at the Olympia in Dublin years ago in aid of Repeal the 8th, and more recently, the group contributed to Ruth-Anne Cunningham’s “Irish Women in Harmony” project. Collaborating with 38 other Irish female musicians on a cover of the Cranberries song, Dreams, the venture raised over €200,000 for Safe Ireland. Speaking of their experience, the group says, “That was a great lockdown project that, most importantly, shone a light on the female scene in Irish music.”

The band has made good use of their lockdown time. They’ve finished their upcoming record Awake You Lie, — which is now available for preorder on their website — and are in the process of editing the music video for their most recent single, Rapture. Comfortable in their studio set up (a boat on the Spree), Wyvern Lingo is grateful to the city of Berlin and its appreciation for people doing creative things, and are excited for their audience to experience the vibrancy of the city through their video.