Barry Quinlan and Sam Duffy, frontman and guitarist of Irish rock band Bleech 9:3, are each other’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous – a role they describe, with a smile, as “alleged”. The pair met through AA meetings in Dublin, where Barry, already sober, took on the role of guiding Sam through the 12-step programme. Their shared journey through recovery has become the bedrock of both their friendship and their music.
The band are currently riding a wave of success. On stage in a Camden pub, Barry hunches and jerks around the mic stand with the intensity of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, as jubilant teenagers spin in a circle pit. The gig in mid-May carried the same electric “I was there” energy as early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC shows. Major labels have signed them on both sides of the Atlantic – Polydor Records released their self-titled debut EP on 15 May 2026 – and they are booked for dozens of festival dates this summer, including The Great Escape, Latitude, Reading & Leeds, and Tramlines. Last week they supported Nick Cave. The five-song EP has drawn critical praise from outlets including The Guardian, NME, Kerrang!, and Dork, along with heavy radio play from BBC Radio 1 and 6Music. The band are represented by ATC Management, with co-managers Lee Owens and Dan Pare, and have signed a publishing deal with Kobalt.
Yet when the four band members meet earlier that day in their management company’s offices, there is none of that twitchy, live-wire energy. “It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say ‘alleged sponsor’,” Barry says of his and Sam’s AA role. That calm stillness is hard-earned. Barry, now 28, began drinking in his teens and was in rehab by 20. “I didn’t fight it at all: please put me in somewhere.” But after his first residential stint, he quickly relapsed, entering a period of isolation. A second 15-week stretch of rehab was followed by being drunk after one day at home. Then, on 22 February 2019, he entered his third treatment centre. “I went into my last place – please God – and thought: how have I ended up in a place like this again? In that questioning, it all hit me. I was so far away from myself, from everything, and I knew that was all coming for me again, like the bullet had left the gun.” Letting his mind wander into darkness, he recalls: “All right, God, you better be real because I’m fucked if you’re not.’ And in that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the obsession to use was taken away.” The next day in group therapy he read aloud ten consequences of his addiction and “erupted into tears. It was beautiful; it felt like an exorcism, like finally reaching the shore.”
Sam’s path was similarly arduous. He had long been “incredibly attracted to the idea of just getting fucked up all the time, because I was so uncomfortable in my own skin for so long”. Each attempt at sobriety would last a few months, then fail. “When that itch starts to tell you to have a drink again, you can never remember how much shit it caused you before. Luckily, enough bad shit had happened to me, and I’d failed enough times, that the last time the itch came to me, I said to Barry: I need to do something about this or something really bad’s gonna happen.” By then Barry had already sponsored “a whole legion of dudes” in AA and helped Sam through the programme.
Barry passed 1,000 days sober, but it wasn’t smooth. “When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know? I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.” Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork. “I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone. And then I heard Jesus speak, as clear as day: ‘Come and speak to me.’ I can’t ignore that; I’m not foolish enough to put that down to psychosis.” Since then, he says, “I’ve felt a presence in my life that I can’t ignore. For me, recovery is proof that there is a God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in an addict’s life, to them, to their family: nothing but carnage and evil.” Sam also experienced a spiritual awakening – common in AA, which encourages a belief in a power greater than yourself – but his was different. “I didn’t understand Catholicism at all. I tried it, hard, but in the end I have a belief in a personal God. It is still Christian.”
Addiction runs deep in both families. Barry’s paternal grandfather was an alcoholic; his maternal grandfather a gambling addict. “So we kind of had it coming from both sides. You’re born with that illness.” Because of Barry’s trials, his younger brother James – now the band’s bassist – was sent to rehab aged 17. “My parents had gone through the nightmare years in the house, with Barry, and my sisters as well. We were all … The fucking thing was fucked, for lack of a better word. I was kind of showing signs. So, like: do you want to go to rehab?” It didn’t last; unlike Barry and Sam, James and drummer Luke O’Neill are not alcoholics. “The therapist wasn’t convinced; I probably didn’t belong there. But I learned a lot.” Luke also grew up around addiction. “Where we come from, it’s more common than not. Overconsumption is socially normalised in Ireland. I started drinking when I was young, we all did, at 12, 13. And addiction runs in my family. I guess I know how to deal with it well, and I know that it should be treated very seriously.” When Sam first reached out wanting to get sober, he called Luke. “I could sense that it was just panic. I only wanted to be there for him.”
That raw honesty and vulnerability, forged in AA meetings and personal struggle, directly shapes the band’s songwriting. They describe an “extremely open and honest creative environment”. The lyrics on the EP are autofictional: “Jacky” paints a nihilist protagonist, “Cannonball” depicts doomed romantics, and “Ceiling” was inspired by another addict in recovery with Barry and Sam who relapsed and died. “I remember my last phone call with him,” Barry says. “I was saying, ‘Brother, I understand’, and he said: ‘No man, I don’t think you do.’ And he hung up the phone and a month later he was dead. People our age that died as a result of the illness, that’s something that keeps calling to me, keeps coming up in the writing.” On “No Surprise”, Barry sings: “So to change your yesterdays / Call an angel in to sow your heart around your head.” He calls that line “a how-to. Like a book: Sort Yourself Out for Dummies. Seek some spiritual thing to take what’s in your heart and plant it around your head as if it was a garden. Grow love in your mind as opposed to the barren wasteland there.” The EP also includes “Underrated”, which explores how love can twist into something darker, and biblical and spiritual themes run throughout their catalogue.
The band began life in two separate pairs. Barry and his brother James were in one band; Sam and drummer Luke in another. After Barry and Sam’s AA sponsorship deepened into friendship, they started making music together, and eventually all four ditched their previous projects. Sam’s girlfriend lived in London and he realised “in order for [the band] to do this properly, we needed to be here, in front of the industry”. He moved over and worked in a guitar shop; Barry joined him and got a job at All Saints in Spitalfields; the other two arrived four months later. They relocated to London in 2024. The band’s name “Bleech” signifies a clean start; the meaning of “9:3” is left for listeners to interpret. Their sound is a “heavy alt-grunge” style, with corrosive guitar lines and a 90s-infused intensity. They cite influences including Radiohead, Nirvana, Deftones, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and contemporary acts such as Fontaines D.C., Shame, Keo, and Wunderhorse, as well as 70s glam rock and traditional Irish folk music. Luke compares the noise they make to “lightning and thunder, a big explosion. There was communal feeling that there was something different about this group – we were smiling more when we left the room.”
Bleech 9:3 are part of a wave of Irish alternative talent today – alongside Fontaines DC, Kneecap, CMAT, Sprints and many others. For Barry, the vibrancy feels hard-won after “the long years of being occupied by another country, your culture being this thing that if you openly share in it you might be attacked or thrown in prison”. He points to the historical poverty that meant art was created from “very minimal and ubiquitous things. Anyone can write a poem. Instruments are slightly more expensive but they were all over the place. You imagine people gathering in the pub, sheltering, it’s warmer than the place they live. People share in these difficult things through art. You come from the same soil as these people, and you inherit the idea that everyone has the right.” The band also draw inspiration from cinema – citing David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick and Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66 – and view their own work as cinematic. Barry has also spoken out against “lad culture” at shows, which he defines as “aggressive, over-the-top, intimidating, just socially unaware stuff”, insisting the band “is not about any type of lad culture”.
The band have been working non-stop. “I feel empty, dude,” Barry admits. “You turn into this machine that comes to life for like an hour every day [for a gig] and the rest of it you’re just trying to conserve your energy.” Sam outlines their itinerary: “We’re in the middle of a five-week UK tour, then we write the album, then we do 40 festivals. Then October we record, and then tour. But how lucky are we, to be tired in pursuit of our dreams?” The album, when it comes, will “tell the broader story of those years back home”, Barry says. But already there are lifetimes of wisdom condensed into their little catalogue. Playing those songs live, he says, “is the best test of all: of how true to your art you have really been. And I’m so glad that we’ve done what we’ve done with those songs, because that’s a little lifeline every day. You get to play them.”