The Ride
Shares

The Ride Shares formed in Cork the way most Irish bands do — out of too much time, too little money, and a pub that didn't card too carefully. Bram and Rory Flynn had been playing together since secondary school, a rhythm section that functioned less like a partnership and more like a single stubborn organism. Maeve came in through a session night at a venue that no longer exists. Conn followed. Kit Kearney arrived last, said almost nothing, and fit immediately.

The music they make is loud in the way Cork itself is loud — not aggressive, exactly, but insistent. Built on fiddle lines that have been run through distortion pedals, on pub-chorus melodies that were written to be sung back by a room full of people who've had three pints and mean every word. The Celtic bones are all there. The punk just gets in and makes itself at home.

Their debut album, The Man Who Would Be King, was written over the course of a wet Irish winter, mostly in Bram's kitchen. It is about ambition and the gap between who you are and who you told yourself you'd be — a theme the band pursues with more humor than self-pity, and more self-pity than they'd admit to.

They have never owned a tour van. They have played venues that seated forty people and venues that seated four hundred and found both equally comfortable. Maeve has described their live show as "controlled chaos." Bram has described it as "mostly controlled." The crowd tends to agree with neither and come back anyway.