If you haven’t heard MARKIEVICZ yet, that’s about to change. The Dublin cloud-rap trio — xcaliber, J.F.O and objectsnwo, have been bubbling under the surface since 2021, sharpening swords in bedrooms and basements across the city, and now they’re finally pulling the pin. GUERRILLA, their debut EP, is out now, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin: disruptive, unapologetic, and built for war.

The name isn’t just for show. MARKIEVICZ share their moniker with Constance Markievicz — Irish revolutionary, tenacious as hell, fight-for-what’s-right mentality — and that same fire courses through every frequency of this project. These three aren’t here to play nice. They’re here to make a big impact as a small unit in an industry that feels rigged against the little man. And honestly? It shows.

The title itself says everything. GUERRILLA is both aesthetic and philosophy, a statement of intent from three artists operating entirely outside the machinery of traditional music industry structures. Self-produced, self-engineered, and creatively inseparable, MARKIEVICZ make music with the intensity of people who feel like they have something to prove. There’s defiance in every distorted bassline, every exhausted hook, every fragmented late-night confession.

But beneath the project’s abrasive exterior lies something unexpectedly vulnerable. Across the EP, the trio unpack heartbreak, addiction, mental health struggles, displacement, and identity crises with a level of honesty that feels almost intrusive. On “Blackened Hands”, politically charged imagery and grunge instrumentation crash into meditations on self-destruction and inherited trauma, while “Brandy Blues” drifts through woozy melodies and stripped-back introspection like the soundtrack to the morning after emotional collapse.

Death hangs over the project constantly, not theatrically, but conversationally. It exists in passing thoughts, fragmented prayers, and half-awake anxieties. xcaliber’s haunting refrain, “I’m havin’ visions of my grave, can you wait?”, feels spiritually aligned with the project’s wider atmosphere: a world where burnout, substance abuse, paranoia and hopelessness blur together into everyday life. There’s something distinctly Irish about the way MARKIEVICZ approaches this darkness too. Their lyricism carries the same poetic fatalism woven throughout generations of Irish storytelling, where humour and despair often sit side-by-side at the bar until closing time.

That tension between beauty and chaos is what gives GUERRILLA its weight. Sonically, the project moves like a memory unravelling in real time, ghostly pads dissolve into distorted drums, delicate melodies collapse into blown-out bass, and moments of clarity are quickly swallowed back into emotional static. Despite spanning songs written across multiple years, the EP feels remarkably cohesive, largely due to xcaliber’s in-house production and the trio’s near-telepathic chemistry.

That chemistry has been building for some time. Since first meeting in 2021, the three artists have quietly sharpened their sound through solo releases, underground performances, and collaborative projects before officially consolidating under the MARKIEVICZ banner following a standout support slot for Conway The Machine in 2024. Yet GUERRILLA doesn’t feel calculated or industry-minded. If anything, its refusal to smooth out its rough edges is exactly what makes it compelling.

At its core, GUERRILLA is less about escapism than survival. These are songs written by people trying to understand themselves in real time, documenting the mess rather than pretending they’ve transcended it. The result is a debut project that feels raw, unstable, deeply self-aware, and impossible to ignore.

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