Gilda House electrifies Bozeman's Rialto

This past Saturday, the band Gilda House came to Bozeman and performed at the Rialto. They put on a rousing show with eclectic pop and LED lights to accompany the dreamy vocals of lead singer Meg Gildehaus. 

“Whenever Log Jam [a venue operator and event promoter] sends emails, I always listen, of course. When I heard [Gildehaus] sing and how nice they sounded, I said, okay, we’ve gotta see this. And it was free,” Dean Shaw, a regular of the Rialto, said. “We don’t listen to a lot of this stuff, we’re older so we didn’t grow up with that kind of stuff.” ”

Gilda House is a Billings-based trio that has gained incredible popularity since they formed in 2019. “I think electronic-synth-pop is a good umbrella for us, there’s many other things that go into it but that’s a good summary,” Morales said. 

Gilda House has been taking their new song, “Anam Cara” along with them for the last leg of the tour, which they performed in Bozeman last weekend. “Anam Cara is an Irish term for soul friend and it’s cool because I always love going down different rabbit holes of things that people find and celebrate and enjoy across cultures and across time and just like the core things that make us human,” Gildehaus said. “I hadn’t come across something that celebrated friendship as like a formal kind of spiritual relationship.”

Gilda House focuses its energy on creating music with a deeper meaning  and draws inspiration from bands like Paramore and artists like Lady Gaga.

“It’s pretty funny because we’ve been listening to it for eight weeks and we kind of went through all the phases of like, this is really good, and, oh I’m kind of over this, and, oh maybe this is good, and nobody else has heard it until yesterday,” Lynch said. 

As for their more recent work, Gilda House has focused on recreating a sound reminiscent of the ‘70s. “We used a lot of these techniques on Anam Cara, like we put a tee-shirt over the snare drum, a mono overhead, and really went with how they would have tracked it in the ‘70s.” 

As their tour finishes, the band is excited to return to the studio and make more music together. “We’ve been touring, playing shows for the last year pretty much and it's just been awesome to kind of switch gears into recording mode, and it’s just been really easy and organic to kind of fall into that, bounce ideas off of each other that are just brand new,” Morales said. 

They hope to have an album coming out next year, so be on the lookout for new music from Gilda House — and be sure to check out their new single “Anam Cara” while you’re at it.