Dead Dads Club

There is a crematorium on the outskirts of my hometown. As the years have slipped by, it is a place with which I’ve sadly become increasingly familiar. In the main hall, the focal point is an imposing stained-glass window, an installation that I have developed a gently throbbing resentment toward. It depicts a raft sailing towards the horizon, its crossed mast holding steady a set of softly billowing sails. Above it hangs a celestial nightscape, rendered in strangely psychedelic hues of purple, red and yellow.

Perhaps my disdain for the stained-glass window stems not from its seemingly inappropriate colour palette or stark spiritual ambiguity, but from the fact that it has, time and again, formed the backdrop to some of the most painful moments of my life. Over time, it has accumulated a meaning far beyond its original function, becoming a shorthand for grief itself, a looming presence that quietly underscores the personal tragedies that have shaped me. Rather than offering hope, or even a semblance of emotional buoyancy, its opaque panes obscure any vision of a future beyond that cold, dim room.

For most, these associations are kept private. Their painful resonance requires them to be folded away, seldom interrogated. Yet, grief does not dissipate simply because it is left unexamined. On their self-titled debut, Dead Dads Club take a different approach, gathering the ephemera of frontman Chilli Jesson’s father’s passing and reshaping it into something clear-eyed, a record that looks beyond loss while simultaneously acknowledging its full weight.

Photo Credit: Dead Dads Club by Adrian Lee

Chilli was just fourteen years old when his father passed away. “It took me ten years to do this record,” he tells me as we chat at the tail end of 2025. “I felt like I didn’t have the ammunition to do it.” Despite his initial trepidation, the album succeeds in recognising the universality of grief, playing with a kaleidoscopic sonic palette that paints vast, visceral dioramas in vivid technicolour, ushering in a new creative dawn for Jesson and co. 

The project is an immersive experience, drawing the listener into his world in the immediate aftermath of this seismic moment by capturing the sounds that defined his younger years. “I wanted it to feel like the music that was around me, what my cousins were playing back then,” he says. “Stuff like Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age, loads of Bright Eyes. I started listening to those records again on repeat, becoming obsessed with them, bringing myself back to a specific place I hadn’t opened up in a long time.”

The album charts the time from his father’s passing up until the formation of his former band, Palma Violets. Naturally, revisiting this period was always going to be tough. In order to do his experiences justice, Chilli was forced to inhabit his former self and tap back into all of those painful memories, somewhat like a method actor preparing for a lead role. “I’ve really had to dig deep and open that box of shit I wanted to keep in the closet,” he explains. The struggle speaks not only to the emotional weight of the subject matter, but also to a personal assessment of his depleted creative reserves.

Following the disbandment of Palma Violets, Chilli struggled to reconnect with the energy that had helped produce the seminal 180 and its follow-up, Danger in the Club. “I came out of Palma Violets, tried a couple of other things and they didn’t really work. I just felt creatively numb,” he remembers. That feeling would linger until he was invited on the road by Fontaines D.C back in 2023. By the end of that tour, he had become the band’s de facto sixth member, but more importantly, he had rediscovered his voice, “it opened me up to be braver in the songwriting.”

Being in the van with the band, back in the routine of touring helped lay the groundworks for this project. “I love being with a group of people, I thrive on that,” he says. “I have a hard time being on my own. Sharing moments is far more inspiring.” Touring with Fontaines not only provided the creative spark he needed to start putting pen to paper again, it also helped to stoke the relationship with guitarist and producer Carlos O’Connell, who would go on to shape the album's tense, disorientating sound, further expanding its emotional resonance.

“The themes and influences were all there, but there was no connecting sound,” Chilli recalls. In time it became apparent that O’Connell was the missing piece of the jigsaw. “That album, before he entered the picture, was pretty fragmented. Everything was there, but it felt disjointed musically. He really tied it all together in such a brilliant way.” 

Recording the project live over just five days, O’Connell pushed Jesson into new realms of performance, shifting the record from something merely conceptual into something genuinely affecting. “I’ve done loads of pop stuff before, writing for other people, where everything is meticulously chopped,” Chilli explains. “I really wanted there to be urgency, a feeling as if I’m there at that time. Carlos made the decision to do long takes, to have the vocals all live and a bit wonky, a bit paranoid. Those were all his ideas, and they cemented the whole thing for me.”

In shaping this record, it seems clear that Jesson wasn’t just arranging songs, but was also navigating his grief, taking the time to fully process it. The tension of the live takes, the rawness of the vocals, the commitment to embracing imperfection, these aren’t just stylistic choices but a mirror image of the way loss plays out in all our lives. Messy, persistent and unavoidable. Dead Dads Club appears as both a record and a passage, a way of moving through these feelings without pretending they can be neatly contained.

At the crematorium, you leave the hall through a narrow corridor that opens onto a garden, unexpectedly abundant, alive with flowers and birdsong. There is a shift in light, an almost imperceptible loosening of the air, a horizon glimpsed beyond the oppressive weight of the room you’ve just left.

Dead Dads Club unfolds in much the same way. It doesn’t undo the loss at its centre, or attempt to render it beautiful, but it offers a passage through it, a way of moving forward without closing the door behind you.

Dead Dads Club by Dead Dads Club is out 23rd January via Fiction Records.