You’ve got to listen to the new album by I Plead Irony. If you haven’t discovered this phenomenon yet, let me tell you, it’s a three-member alternative rock band made up of Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald, and Lawrence Arnold. The three are long-time friends who have been making music together in different forms since around 2004. Their sound blends alternative rock with punk and blues influences. What makes them interesting is their mix of dark themes, dry humour, and a fascination with contradictions. Their previous albums include ‘This Statement Is False’ and ‘The Solution Is The Problem’. The band’s approach to music feels instinctive, with ideas being jammed, pulled apart, and rebuilt together. They also have a very casual, friendship-driven dynamic, which keeps the music from feeling overly serious.
“Where dark thoughts meet bright riffs, ‘This Monologue Conversation’ finds its own rhythm.”
‘This Monologue Conversation’ immediately feels like an album made by musicians who are at the top of their game. The fact that the collection took ten years to complete makes the listening experience and the story more interesting. It was nearly finished before distance and the pandemic put the band on hold, but they eventually returned to the songs because they still believed they deserved to be heard. The 11-track album explores identity, conformity, fear, constraints, self-destruction, progress, and reversal. The tracklist itself is so dynamic, with titles like ‘Architect Effect’, ‘Inside The Lines’, ‘Undone’, ‘History’, ‘Death By Internal Combustion’, and ‘Falling Upwards’. I like how the album can deal with darker subjects without becoming emotionally exhausting.
There is a dry, playful humour running through the band’s identity that gives the heavier themes some breathing space. The alternative rock foundation keeps the album energetic, while the punk and blues fringes add character to the sound. The album feels less like a carefully constructed “statement” and more like three friends making the music they genuinely enjoy. The contradiction between serious themes and the band’s laid-back personality is one of the album’s biggest strengths. Personally, the story behind the album makes it more enjoyable because these songs clearly survived for a reason.
We also interviewed this amazing band, so you get some extra snippets from the album and their career in music. Read below:
1. You’ve been making music together in different forms since around 2004, and that long friendship seems to be a big part of I Plead Irony. How has knowing each other for so long shaped the way you create and challenge each other as a band?
I Plead Irony: There’s a shorthand that comes from playing together for that long. We don’t really have to explain very much to each other, and there’s very little ego involved. Someone brings an idea in, we pull it apart, try things, and see where it goes. We’re also comfortable enough with each other to say when something isn’t working without anyone taking it personally. At this point, the band is as much a social club as anything else, which probably helps.
‘2. This Monologue Conversation’ took nearly ten years to complete and survived distance, a pandemic, and a long pause. When you finally returned to the record, did the songs feel different to you, or did they still carry the same spark that made you want to finish them?
I Plead Irony: A bit of both. Musically, we still really liked the songs, which was ultimately why we finished the album. If we’d come back to them and thought they weren’t very good, I’m not sure we would have bothered! But some of the lyrics definitely felt different after everything that had happened. The songs hadn’t changed, but the world had. Everything seemed to take on a second meaning.
3. Contradiction seems to sit at the centre of I Plead Irony, from your name and previous albums to the themes explored on this record. What fascinates you about placing serious ideas alongside humour and a more playful approach to making music?
I Plead Irony: I think contradiction is just interesting. Very few things are completely one thing or another, and people are especially good at contradicting themselves. I’m certainly no exception. Humour also stops it becoming too self-important. We can write about fairly serious things, but we’re still three mates in a room taking the piss out of each other. I think both sides of that belong in the band.
4. The album moves through themes like identity, conformity, fear, self-destruction, progress, and reversal without becoming overwhelmingly dark. How did you approach balancing these heavier ideas with the energy and character of your alternative rock sound?
I Plead Irony: I don’t think we consciously tried to balance them. The music tends to come first and has its own energy, while the lyrics can go somewhere much darker. I quite like that contrast. A song doesn’t necessarily have to sound miserable just because it’s talking about something difficult. In fact, sometimes it’s better the other way around, perhaps because it can be expressed in a different way.
5. You’ve described your creative process as ideas being brought into the room, pulled apart, jammed, and rebuilt until they either become songs or disappear. What does that process look like when the three of you are working together, and how do you know when an idea is truly an I Plead Irony song?
I Plead Irony: Usually, somebody turns up with a riff, a verse and chorus, or just the beginnings of something, and then it effectively belongs to all three of us. We’ll play it, change it, extend bits, remove bits and generally mess around with it until it feels right. There isn’t really a test for whether something is an I Plead Irony song. If we’re still excited enough about it to play it again the following week, it’s probably on its way. If nobody mentions it again, that normally tells us something too.
6. Now that this album has finally found its way into the world, what does the next chapter of I Plead Irony look like? Are you already writing new material, thinking about live shows, or simply enjoying having these songs finally heard?
I Plead Irony: For the moment, I think we’re enjoying the fact that the album actually exists and people are hearing it. After taking that long to finish something, it’s quite nice not to immediately turn it into another deadline. We’ll definitely keep making music, and there are always ideas floating around. Live shows are a little more complicated these days because of geography, but I don’t think any of us sees the album as an ending. We’ve been making music together for more than twenty years now, so I suspect we’ll find something else to make.
Catch the muse here:
Want to discover more such similar tracks? Check out our Rock Muse playlist on Spotify:
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