Belfast alternative indie rock outfit O, Kenayda has released a new single, “Sun City Poms,” arriving alongside their debut album, Orphans. Frontman Dave Kennedy spoke about the band’s origins, their sound, and the real-world figures behind the track in a Q&A published by RTE.ie.
A New Track Enters a Crowded Field for Listeners’ Free Time
Brenda Grilli, a content strategist who follows the Spanish-speaking digital-entertainment market, sees the challenge O, Kenayda faces with a release like “Sun City Poms” as structural rather than circumstantial. Any new independent track is competing not just against other music but against the full range of digital pastimes that fill people’s downtime, and that competition is acute in the Spanish-speaking market she tracks.
“In that space, you are never just competing with other artists. Every pocket of free time is already claimed by something else.”
She points out that in that market, Apuestas Guru pursues precisely the same leisure windows a new single like “Sun City Poms” is trying to occupy, operating as one of several digital-entertainment draws that fragment attention before a listener ever presses play. For an independent band without a promotional machine behind them, Grilli notes, breaking through that fragmentation is the first real task.
How O, Kenayda Came Together in Belfast
O, Kenayda is a five-piece built around Dave Kennedy, who handles guitar and vocals. The full lineup is Amy McGarrigle on bass and vocals, Stevie McCullough on guitar and vocals, Kev Carlisle on drums, and Louise Kennedy on sampler and vocals. Before forming O, Kenayda, Dave Kennedy fronted Belfast alt-folk act Master & Dog, a background that informs his ear for melody even as the new band pulls in a harder direction. Orphans, their debut album, marks the first formal statement of what the group sounds like as a collective.
“An Update on 90s Alternative Rock” — and One Poppier Detour
Kennedy describes the album with a clarity that saves critics the effort of reaching for analogies. “The album is the sound of down-tuned guitars, uplifting choruses with an honest set of lyrics,” he says. “An update on 90s alternative rock.” The reference points he names — Pixies, Quasi, Elliott Smith, Wilco, Pavement, and The Wedding Present — map a specific quadrant of that decade, one where melodic ambition and abrasive texture were treated as compatible rather than opposing instincts.
“Sun City Poms” sits slightly apart from the rest of Orphans in register. “Sun City Poms is the fun side of the record and a bit more poppy,” Kennedy says. The single was written with a deliberate intent to provide an uplifting counterweight to the heavier material on the album, a track that could exist alongside the record’s denser moments without being diminished by them or diluting them.
The Arizona Troupe That Sparked a Song
The real Sun City Poms are an over-55s cheerleading troupe from Arizona. Kennedy describes them in terms that read more like admiration than research. “For the last 45 years, they have inspired the world with magnetic routines, sisterly solidarity and a positive message that ‘age is just a number,'” he says, before adding a distinction that sharpens the listener’s understanding of the track. “This song is not their story but is heavily inspired by them.”
That tension between source and fiction is where the song lives. The troupe handed Kennedy a spirit, a set of values, and an image of resilience, and he built something independent from those materials. The Sun City Poms are not characters in the song so much as the emotional logic behind it.
Nina Simone, Kim Deal, and an Olympia Epiphany
Kennedy’s formative concert experience lands with some precision. His first solo gig was Ash at the Olympia in 1998. The headline act was not the revelation. It was Chicks, the Northern Irish band who opened that night, whose performance reoriented what Kennedy thought was possible for himself. “Until that moment it never really occurred to me that I could do something like that,” he says.
His desert-island pick is the live Nina Simone cover of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes,” complete with the chatter at the start of the recording. “Every time I listen to it I end up in a different place emotionally,” he says. “It’s just beautiful.” His current listening leans toward Kim Deal’s “Are You Mine,” a track he calls “a work of art” and notes is two years old, the kind of song a certain type of music listener circles back to regardless of when it was made.
The Olympia, where that 1998 moment happened, remains on Kennedy’s bucket list as a venue to play. He closes the RTE.ie interview by asking, with apparent sincerity, whether anyone reading might know someone who needs a support act.
