Irish band BRICKNASTY are back with a reworking of Ne-Yo’s classic RnB cut in new monochrome visuals which features photography from Ross McDonnell’s ‘Joyrider’.

BRICKNASTY have been busy in the last 12 months. They’ve shelled performances at Other Voices in Dingle, announced festival dates for the summer and meandered between styles with each subsequent release, showcasing the unpredictable nature of their music.

Doubling down on this approach, the band have shared a crooning reworking of Ne-Yo’s ‘So Sick’. Breathing new life into the classic 2000s RnB cut, the pair float over stripped back and rickety instrumentation whilst black and white images of Ballymun flash in the background.

Ahead of the premiere, we spoke to BRICKNASTY about the video and their forthcoming show in the Sugar Club in March.

What inspired the use of imagery from Ross McDonnell’s Joyrider?

Just remember sulking for ages during lockdown about how all that was properly left of my Ballymun, my home, where I grew up and where me whole family the last 40 odd years grew up was gone there wasn’t any of it left that wasn’t just sterile stock images. Totally unromantic and ugly the way RTE would show them nothing like how they felt to the people who actually lived there. They knocked down our flats and built shiny new ones directly on top of where they used to be for affluent students to study at DCU or whatever and me head was just wrecked over it. So when I seen the first picture of the steps in Joyrider I knew straight away Ross was after doing something special. 

It had been 6 years since I saw them steps I spent the first 14 years of me life sitting on, falling in love with life. I had a lump in me throat when I actually got the book as a gift cause when I opened it it was literally MY ballymun. 2005 – 2011 it would have been me and all me cousins and little pals getting our first boyfriends and girlfriends, having water fights, screaming and shouting pushing each other around in trolleys, people tearing around on scramblers. It’s sad that me ma, uncles, nannies and all the rest won’t get a book like that for their ballymun, that would of been even more different again throughout the 80s and 90s but what Ross McDonnell done in that book is as close as anyones going to get to living in them last few breaths Ballymun took before the regeneration smothered it and broke the whole thing to pieces. 

Me own estate that I live in is full of the same people what grew up with me in the flats and their younger brothers and kids or whatever so you still feel a lot of what it used to be like and cause its a new take on an old song I just thought it be nice to get a few boys off the road now and few different spots from the road now and put it next to how stuff used to be before even the parts of Ballymun that are still Ballymun are Glasnevin’d into nothing. Maybe that way in the future when it’s all gone youngfellas what wanna look back same as I did might be able to with this video.

Likewise, where did the idea to rework “Love Sick” come from?

I just picked up the riff from listening and wished I wrote it so me and Cillian banged her out in about twenty mins. Happy accident that for me it’s one a them songs that really snuggly fits in them days we’re showing you in the video. Right along with 50, Akon and everyone else who we all idolised growing up.

It comes as BRICKNASTY announce the second show in their residency in the Sugar Club, with f3miii, Tomike, DeCarteret and Khakikid on Wednesday 16 March.

Watch the video for ‘SO SICK’ below:

Previous Premiere: Rory Sweeney, Curtisy and Ahmed, With Love. explore the capital in ‘Men On A Mission.’