Our Rating: 9/10

From the forthcoming album People Are Mad (April 17th)

There is a particular dignity in songs that do not try to impress you.

Sean Griffin’s “Be My Girl” does not posture. It does not modernise itself for algorithmic approval. It does not chase nostalgia either. It simply stands there, scuffed boots planted, and tells the truth about loneliness.

Best known as the long-standing frontman of Irish-American punk outfit The Ruffians, Griffin has spent more than two decades howling over beer-soaked stages across the US and Ireland. But this first solo single shifts the lens inward. The bravado is dialled down. The confession is dialled up.

“Be My Girl” is not a love song in the romantic sense. It is a survival song.

Built on a stripped-back, working-class realism, the track circles around routine. Pints. Late nights. Empty rooms. The quiet humiliation of watching life move forward for everyone else. The chorus does not soar so much as linger. It feels like a thought that keeps returning at 2am.

What makes the song land is its refusal to decorate its own sadness. There is no poetic abstraction masking the ache. Griffin sings plainly. Directly. There is grit in his voice, but not performance grit. Lived grit.

This is a man who has played over two thousand shows, who still tours relentlessly while raising six children and running a hotel in upstate New York. That biography matters, not as myth-making, but because the fatigue in this song feels earned. You believe him.

Musically, “Be My Girl” leans into roots and pub-rock textures rather than full-throttle punk. There are echoes of Irish ballad tradition in the storytelling cadence, even as the structure remains closer to garage rock. It feels like a bridge between two lives: the punk frontman and the reflective father.

The song’s central plea is deceptively simple. It asks for companionship. But beneath that sits something heavier: the desire for purpose. The need to feel seen. The exhaustion of carrying on regardless.

If this single is indicative of what People Are Mad will offer, the album promises to be less about spectacle and more about reckoning. Griffin appears uninterested in reinventing himself. Instead, he is revealing himself.

There is a quiet courage in that.

In an era where vulnerability is often stylised into aesthetic fragility, “Be My Girl” feels stubbornly unpolished. It does not glamorise loneliness. It just sits with it.

And sometimes that is more powerful than any shout-along chorus.