The Shortbread Tin Isn't the Whole Language

I caught myself doing the thing again about an hour ago. I had a Celtic folk playlist on in the background, and my brain immediately reached for the shortbread-tin version – bagpipes, a ceilidh band in a tourist pub, the kind of thing that gets piped over the tannoy at an airport gift shop to remind you you've landed somewhere "authentic." And I hated that I did it, because I know better. I've spent enough time actually inside Gaelic culture by now – learning the language, reading the history, following the Wheel of the Year – to know the tourist-shop version is a flattening, not a description. It just turns out the flattening runs deeper into the back of my head than I'd like to admit.

What actually snapped me out of it, this time, was a metalcore band from Glasgow who scream in a language most people my age can't place on a map.

The World's Only Gaelic Metalcore Band

Gun Ghaol started as one guy's TikTok account. Colin Stone, the vocalist, spent much of his formative years on the Isle of Lewis – proper Gàidhealtachd, half his family from there – and grew up on Linkin Park and Slipknot rather than anything you'd call trad. He began writing and recording alone, in Gàidhlig, because it was the language he actually thought and worked in, and metalcore was the genre he'd loved since he was a teenager. The project only became a performing band in the summer of 2025, once the online following got big enough to justify it. Now they're a five-piece – Colin on vocals, Paul Martin and Ewan Cruickshank on guitars, Finlay Cable on bass, Stuart Bradley on drums – playing Belladrum, Donegal, Edinburgh, the Netherlands, and somehow finding time to release a double single with Vileblood along the way. (Small, entirely unearned bit of pride: one of the guitarists shares my name. I'll take it.)

Every lyric, every song title, every album name: Gàidhlig. Not a word of English concession anywhere in it. Even the band's name plays the same game – Gun Ghaol translates to "Without Love," which is a very metalcore thing to call yourself while writing exclusively in an endangered language most of your potential audience can't read. My favourite of theirs is "Gun Alba" – can't recommend it enough if you want the sound of all this rather than just the description of it.

Here's the detail that actually got me, though: Gun Ghaol isn't Celtic metal. It's metalcore – the Bring Me the Horizon, Knocked Loose lineage, not the Eluveitie, tin-whistles-over-blast-beats lineage. There's no folk instrumentation smuggled in to make the Gaelic feel "earned" or period-appropriate. It's just the language, dropped straight into a genre that owes nothing to Celtic aesthetics at all, and it works precisely because nobody involved was trying to make it sound like a re-enactment. Which means, a little ironically, the traditional Gaelic and Celtic music world has been slower to embrace them than Glasgow's metal scene has – a genuinely underground genre turned out to be more welcoming to an "underground" language than the community built around preserving it. I don't think that's a knock on trad music. I think it says something about how tightly "Celtic" gets bolted to a specific sound the second it becomes anyone's job to protect it.

Then There's Chasing Abbey, Doing It From the Other Direction

I found Chasing Abbey a few weeks after Gun Ghaol, and it's a nice symmetry – Gàidhlig on one side, Gaeilge on the other, both pointed at genres nobody would call Celtic on sight. Chasing Abbey are a trio out of Tullamore, over ten years into a career now, working in what they call tradhouse – electronic production fused with Irish traditional influence, but built for a dancefloor rather than a session.

Their song "Íorónta" is the one that stuck with me most. Released in October 2025, apparently motivated by the fallout around Mo Chara from KNEECAP, it's built on banjo, guitar, and drums – folk bones under a more contemporary arrangement rather than a full electronic production. The title just means "ironic," and the chorus lands in Gaeilge: tóg an teanga, tóg an talamh – take the language, take the land. It's a song about colonialism calling resistance "terrorism" while doing the actual terrorising, sung partly in the exact language that colonialism spent centuries trying to erase. That's not incidental. Using Gaeilge to accuse the empire that suppressed Gaeilge is the whole argument, delivered in the form itself rather than just the lyric sheet.

What I appreciate most, though, is that they're careful with the aim, and they say so directly rather than leaving it to inference. There's a line in the second verse – "I know it's only a couple, guilty of all the bad deeds, still it hits different when I see history unfold on repeat" – that does the threading explicitly. It's not a song that flattens "the English" or "the British" into one guilty mass. It names the scale correctly: a couple, not everyone, the architects and not every person who happened to be born under the flag they raised. That's a harder needle to thread than it sounds, and a lot of anti-colonial writing doesn't bother threading it at all. Chasing Abbey do. It's the same distinction I try to hold onto myself when I'm picking apart what "British" means to me – the anger belongs at the people who did the deciding, not at everyone downstream of it. There's something genuinely comforting in that precision, too. It means I can throw my full weight behind Gàidhlig and Gaeilge – the languages, the revival, the bands doing new things with both – without that support getting tangled up in the guilt and discomfort I carry around "British" as a word. The target's specific. Supporting the language isn't an indictment of anyone innocent, and it doesn't need to feel like one.

The Actual Pattern Underneath Both of Them

What I like about holding these two bands up next to each other is that they're not doing the same thing musically at all – one's metalcore, one's electronic dance-pop with trad bones – but they're doing the exact same thing politically, whether either band would phrase it that way or not. They're taking a minority language that got beaten out of schoolchildren, or nearly legislated out of existence, and putting it somewhere the "Celtic" stereotype has no reach. Nobody's doing a tin-whistle solo over "Íorónta." Nobody's putting a Gun Ghaol breakdown over bagpipes. And that absence is the point – it forces the language to stand on its own, rather than riding in on an aesthetic that a shortbread tin already taught everyone to associate with the past tense.

I still love the trad stuff too, for what it's worth. Waulking songs, sean-nós singing, all of it. Liking Gun Ghaol doesn't cancel that out, and I don't think it's supposed to. But I needed something like Gun Ghaol and Chasing Abbey to actually break the reflex, because trad music alone was never going to do it – trad music is exactly the register the stereotype was built out of in the first place, however unfairly. It took a Glaswegian screaming in Gàidhlig over a breakdown, and three lads from Offaly turning colonial history into a chorus you can dance to, to remind me that Gaelic and Irish aren't dead languages doing a museum reenactment. They're languages people are actively building new things out of, in genres that were never going to ask permission first.

The Receipts, For the Numbers-Minded

If you want this in scrobbles rather than reflection: Gun Ghaol have been on rotation since the tail end of May, pushing a hundred plays now, and the honest top track isn't the one I called my favourite up top – "Air An Oir" and "Salm" have both quietly outpaced "Gun Alba" in raw repeats. Says something about the gap between what you reach for on a loop and what you'd actually tell someone to start with. Chasing Abbey are newer to the rotation, only since late June, but "Íorónta" alone accounts for most of those plays, which at least tracks with it being the one this whole post is built around.

And the Celtic folk playlist that kicked this off wasn't a vague memory dressed up for effect. Eivør, Kiki Rockwell, and Korpiklaani have all been recurring names for the better part of a year, but the same sitting I started writing this in also had a run of names newer to me – Karliene, Roxane Genot, Nadia Birkenstock – queued up right alongside them. Which is about as close to "caught in the act" as a scrobble log gets.

Suas leis a' Ghàidhlig. Gabh a' chànan.