On stage in a Camden pub, Barry Quinlan, frontman of Irish rockers Bleech 9:3, shares the intensity of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. He hunches and jerks around the mic stand and his eyes bore a hole in the back wall as jubilant teenagers expand and contract in a circle pit. The gig in mid-May has the same I-was-there energy as early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC shows; with major labels signing Bleech 9:3 on both sides of the Atlantic, dozens of festival dates this summer and a wildly impressive, impassioned five-song debut EP, the band will soon be playing much bigger rooms than this.

But when I meet Barry and his three bandmates earlier on that day, there’s none of that twitchy energy. Bleech 9:3 bring calm to a meeting room in their management company’s offices as staff bustle around outside. That stillness is hard-earned: Barry and guitarist Sam Duffy are each other’s sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Quinlan smiles: “It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say ‘alleged sponsor’.”

Bleech 9:3 started out in two pairs: Barry and his younger bassist brother James in one band, and guitarist Sam and drummer Luke O’Neill in another. In his previous band, buoyed up by newfound sobriety and spirituality, Barry had written “bright, nearly saccharine” songs, but now, “this is the real story that I wanted to start telling”. That “Bleech” refers to a clean start (though they keep the meaning of the numbers a mystery).

With his voice soaring across grungy guitars, the EP contains autofictional portraits such as the nihilist protagonist of Jacky, and the doomed romantics on Cannonball. On No Surprise, he 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.”

He’s been trying to cultivate his own mindset since his youth. The Quinlan brothers had grown up in Dublin “in a house of five kids, a madhouse”, says Barry. Family life was suffused with music: “In my granny’s cottage in County Clare, I have an image of these big bulbous glasses of red wine, cigarette smoke, and then these songs and acoustic guitar. It really resonated in my heart.” But, he says, “my dad’s dad was an alcoholic. Mum’s dad was a gambling addict. So we kind of had it coming from both sides. You’re born with that illness.”

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 coming out of his residential centre, he quickly relapsed. “That brought me into the real isolation period of my using – I couldn’t do it with my friends because they all knew I shouldn’t be doing it.”

He did another 15-week rehab stint, “and I was drunk after one day being home”. Then, on 22 February 2019, “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.”

He let his mind wander, “into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there has to be something. ‘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.” He decided to do an exercise he’d been asked to do before but never properly engaged with: writing the 10 serious consequences of his addiction. “I went into group therapy the next day and read those things out and just erupted into tears. It was beautiful; it felt like an exorcism, like finally reaching the shore.”

Because of Barry’s trials, his brother James was also sent to rehab aged 17. “My parents had gone through the nightmare years in the house, with Barry, and my sisters as well,” he says, more gruff and halting than his brother. “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 Luke aren’t alcoholics. “The therapist wasn’t convinced; I probably didn’t belong there. But I learned a lot.”

Luke was also affected by alcoholism around him. “Where we come from, it’s more common than not,” he says. “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.” Luke was who Sam first reached for when he wanted to get sober. “When Sam called me, I could sense that it was just panic. I only wanted to be there for him.”

Sam 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,” Sam says. “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 this point, Barry and Sam had been introduced via a mutual friend, and Barry had “sponsored a whole legion of dudes” in AA, so he helped Sam through AA’s 12-step programme.

Barry had already passed 1,000 days sober, but it hadn’t been smooth. “When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know?” he says. “I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.” Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork, which had a room with a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His earlier spiritual awakening crystallised. “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. So I did, and since then 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.”

Equally, for the first year of sobriety, Sam “was on this ‘pink cloud’ as it’s called in recovery, this new way of life. Then the first year to second year was very difficult.” He also had 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.”

The AA sponsorship brought an incredible closeness: Barry and Sam started making music together, and eventually all four of them ditched their previous bands. 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 began working in a guitar shop; Barry joined him and got a job in All Saints in Spitalfields; the other two arrived four months later. All they’d been through fed into the songwriting, and for all the noise in their self-titled EP, it’s suffused with clarity; Luke likens the sound 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.”

As well as their own struggles – Cannonball is inspired by Sam’s failing relationship – there are also real-life characters from outside the band: their most popular song to date, Ceiling, was inspired by another addict who was in recovery with Barry and Sam, and who relapsed. “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.”

Bleech 9:3 are part of a huge wave of Irish alternative talent today, from Fontaines DC to Kneecap, CMAT, Sprints and countless others. For Barry, Ireland having such a vibrant scene 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”.

And the poverty the country has historically faced 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 have been working non-stop; just last week they supported Nick Cave. “I feel empty, dude,” Barry says. “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 there are already lifetimes of wisdom and enlightenment condensed into their little catalogue so far. Playing them live, Barry 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.”