Supposedly a picture speaks a thousand words. In Meryl Streek’s case, a close examination of the cover of his just-released third album Stories They Don’t Teach You At School reveals a few hundred words of protest slogans, newspaper clippings and graffiti pieced together next to roses, daisies, shots of Meryl and various other paraphernalia. In keeping with the punk DIY ethos that birthed the Meryl Streek project, it’s a collage the Dubliner put together himself.
Opener ‘Welcome’ translates these visuals into music, compiling soundbites of news readouts detailing the housing crisis, corruption, homelessness, mental health, addiction and inequality. It’s a forewarning for the uninitiated that the next 37 minutes consist of the angry, exasperated ravings of a man that’s had enough. Across tracks like ‘Council Estates’, ‘Depression’, and ‘Housing For All’, Meryl pours his soul into railing against systemic failures, before setting it all alight amidst pounding beats and crunchy electric guitars. “And what do you like about life?” he questions at the end of ‘Rotten Fruit’, which also features Steve Ignorant of anarcho-punk royalty Crass.
Although his music is firmly rooted in his immediate surroundings of Dublin and Ireland, many of Meryl’s messages have resonated with similarly disaffected listeners across the globe. Chatting over zoom earlier this week, he tells me how he himself was educated about the global scale of the issues he sings about by fans of his music reaching out from New Mexico, Australia, and beyond. Simultaneously, he acknowledges that not everyone will get his music. He recalls supporting John Lydon of the Sex Pistols back in 2023 (“before he turned into a complete wanker politically” Meryl quips) and after every show being greeted by typically middle-aged men that didn’t understand why he was so angry. Amidst the scattergun barrage of grievances that comprise the album’s tenth track ‘Bullet’, he names the “fucking arseholes who feel the need to tell you that politics doesn’t belong in art” as one of many things he hates.
Listening to Stories they Don’t Teach You At School, it’s time and time again evident that the political art that he’s released under the Meryl Streek moniker over the past four years is about making a wider difference beyond himself. Nowhere is this clearer than on Meryl’s favourite track from the album, ‘Kelly’, a tribute to the late Kelly Lynch who was found dead in an Irish canal in March 2024. The track chronicles her family’s ongoing search for justice amidst the police’s investigation’s repeated failings and biases, who first ruled her death a suicide and then drowning, all despite finding 93 injuries on the 23-year old’s body. Kelly’s mother Julieanne – who Meryl remains in close contact with – speaks on the powerful track in memory of her daughter, woven together ahead of Meryl’s closing words:
“And this is a song for Kelly Lynch, may God rest her soul, undeservingly of the end she was given / And you can’t undo the past, but justice needs to be done”
Was there one moment that sparked your journey towards the overtly political songwriting that’s defined the Meryl Streek project?
MS: I was living in Vancouver, Canada for a long time, I was playing in bands, I was walking in and out of Downtown East side of Vancouver every day, I was just seeing a lot of poverty and a lot of drug addiction. And it sort of chipped away at my soul for a whole seven years, like it was kind of getting worse and worse. That’s what kind of pushed me in the direction of doing Meryl Streek. I ended up moving home then, and there was a lot of scandals about the Catholic church at the time, to do with the infants and the unmarked graves that pushed me to writing ‘796’. I just had enough, I had to do something on my own. I never thought I was gonna change the world, but you gotta try and do something to make yourself feel better and sort of give back a little bit.
For me the album’s title Stories They Don’t Teach You At School evoked a childhood innocence as well as the failures and cracks in our system and society. With past tracks like ’False Apologies’, ‘796’ and now songs like ‘Kelly’ on your new album aimed out amplifying voices speaking out against injustices that our society tries to keep quiet about, do you think that your music has an educational quality?
MS: That’s kind of exactly what I was leaning towards with this album, because the first [album] was 796, the second was Songs For The Deceased, and then this one I was like what am I gonna do? I like having a collection of things, if that makes sense, so I needed to put it in a category and that’s kind of what came to mind. I definitely do not think I’m a teacher, I definitely do not think I’m an educator, but when you’re telling stories about certain things and certain cases, you’re singing about having depression and all these other things going on in your life… it’s stuff that they don’t really teach you at school realistically. They don’t tell you [about] getting into debt when you’re older, about saving for a house, it’s just life really, isn’t it?
‘Bullet’ was a song from the album that really stuck out to me, a letting loose of all these things we carry with us that are wrong about the world, from greedy billionaires to Turkish delights. Talk to me about the songwriting process behind that tune.
MS: Man, it was the easiest song I’ve ever made! I’m not even joking. I just wrote six pages of everything I hate in the world, and ‘Bullet’s lyrics only covered not even two of them, so I have like four pages of everything in the world that I hate. And then I kind of roped my record label owner Lags, who plays in Gallows, he stuck some guitars on the song, then Vinny [McCreith] from a really great Dublin band called Adebisi Shank, so it all fell together man. I could sit here all day and just tell you things I hate and despise… I think that might be the next album, just 12 songs of that.
You have some incredible features across the record, from the words of Crass legend Steve Ignorant, who you grew up listening to, to the socially cutting phrases of Frankie McNamara, AKA Meditations for the anxious mind. How important is collaboration in your work and on your new album?
MS: I meet these people in life along the journey and if you think the same as me, you wanna see change in the world, and you have something to offer, then I’m definitely gonna try annoy you to be on the record. These are the latest batch. Steve [Ignorant] was probably the bigger name for me because I was raised a Crass fan and to be able to speak to Steve on Whatsapp phone calls, it was just really bizarre… it takes me a while to register man, working with people you tend to forget who they are, and then you go ‘fucking hell man, this is actually Steve from Crass!’ And it’s never gonna end, I constantly wanna up the game and get people more involved. This is my way of getting a tattoo, these albums are gonna be around forever man.
Thanks for getting Frankie McNamara’s iconic spoken words put to music – I felt it stylistically and lyrically meshed really well in the album’s final track ‘Frankie’s Theme’. Talk to me about how that track came together and the decision behind having it as your closer on the record.
MS: What he was singing about was like something you’d hear at the end of a movie, so I was like maybe it’ll work on the end track. And then when I gave it the name ‘Frankie’s Theme’ for me it felt like the perfect song to close out a record, and that’s kind of what it turned out to be. And you’re right with his voice man… it’s so strange hearing it anywhere else than Instagram, for me atleast! And what he’s singing about as well was kind of more serious than he normally would, so I was just happy to have him take the album home at the end. And he’s an absolute legend as well, he’s such a nice guy.
You have a track on your first album called ‘Death To The Landlord’, where you proclaim unequivocally “if it was up to me, I’d have your head on a fucking plate”. Where does such fiery personal conviction come from?
M: That lyric was written when I was back in Dublin, the whole lyrics were written in honestly the worst council estate in Dublin… people living on top of each other, drugs being dealt left right and centre, fights breaking out every time you walk down the street, that’s kind of the stuff it was written about, so it’s a genuine frustration for me growing up in this area seeing nobody want to make any sort of real change. ‘Landlord’ is pure frustration, it’s real and if you’re not from an area like that you’re not gonna ever understand really. But you can feel the venom in that song and the meaning behind it. It’s just ‘Death To the Landlord’ because we have so many politicians in Ireland that have twenty properties that they’re not paying tax on, they’re not even listed legally, and they’re just renting these properties out for x amount, for any amount of money they want and just really screwing with the housing system even more than we’ve already done. So ‘Landlord’ is always gonna be that song, it’s real for a lot of people that are struggling.
Follow Meryl Streek on Instagram
Words: Taran Will
Photographer: Derek Bremner