I Plead Irony: This Monologue Conversation
I Plead Irony – This Monologue Conversation: Ten Years, Three Friends and One Beautiful Contradiction
by Jack Rush
They always talk about the difficult second album. I Plead Irony have somehow managed to make the difficult third album instead.
There’s an irony in there somewhere.
This Monologue Conversation is the third album from Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald and Lawrence Arnold — three friends who have been making music together in various combinations since around 2004. Ten years in the making, it is a record that somehow survived distance, a pandemic, changing lives and even the temporary disappearance of the band itself.
More remarkably, it survived because nobody was prepared to let eleven good songs disappear with it.
I Plead Irony make alternative rock with punk and blues running through its veins, but their real distinguishing characteristic is an attraction to contradiction. Their songs inhabit the uncomfortable space between the serious and the absurd, the philosophical and the everyday, darkness and dry humour. Even the album title is a paradox: This Monologue Conversation — something that cannot, strictly speaking, exist.
It fits perfectly.
The band's approach to making music is refreshingly uncomplicated. There is little hierarchy and even less room for ego. An idea arrives — perhaps no more than a verse and chorus — and the three musicians pull it apart, jam around it and rebuild it until it becomes something worth returning to. If it doesn't inspire them the following week, it generally doesn't survive.
The songs that do survive become I Plead Irony songs.
That philosophy gives This Monologue Conversation a sense of authenticity. These aren't songs that feel engineered to fit a particular genre or market. They sound like three musicians following their instincts, allowing the music to develop organically while maintaining a fascination with some decidedly uncomfortable subjects.
Fear, conformity, ego, anxiety, self-destruction and the limitations we impose upon ourselves recur throughout the album. Yet the band's criticism is rarely directed entirely outward. I Plead Irony understand that humanity's capacity for stupidity is not something that conveniently belongs to somebody else.
“Inside the Lines” is a particularly good example. Originally conceived as a personal meditation on the constraints people create for themselves, the song took on an unexpectedly wider meaning when revisited after the pandemic. Suddenly, its ideas about conformity, boundaries and liberty seemed to describe not merely individual behaviour but a society grappling with fear and division.
The lyrics hadn't changed.
The world around them had.
“History” takes an even broader perspective, contemplating progress, regression and humanity's curious relationship with its own past. It was one of those songs that seemed to arrive almost fully formed, and years later its implications had become considerably more unsettling. The album repeatedly asks whether civilisation represents genuine progress or merely a temporary interruption in some much darker human pattern.
That might sound like heavy going.
It isn't.
One of the album's greatest strengths is the way I Plead Irony refuse to let their darker ideas become oppressive. There is humour in the cracks, a persistent sense of mischief beneath the existential concerns. The band may be contemplating humanity's capacity for self-destruction, but they sound like three friends who are enjoying themselves enormously while doing it.
And that friendship is crucial to the album.
For all the intellectual ideas floating around the songs, I Plead Irony remains fundamentally a band built on the simple pleasure of getting into a room and making music. After two decades, Jordan, McDonald and Arnold have developed the kind of musical shorthand that can't be manufactured. They know when something works, when it doesn't and — perhaps most importantly — when to stop fiddling with it.
That last skill proved rather more difficult during the making of this record.
The album was largely recorded with Guillaume Doussaud at Swan Sound Studio in France, with additional work taking place at Rauf's home. Then life got in the way. Lawrence's new job meant extensive travel. The band became increasingly difficult to assemble. And then the pandemic arrived.
For a while, I Plead Irony effectively ceased to exist.
The album might easily have disappeared with them.
Instead, by 2025, Paul and Lawrence were applying increasingly firm pressure on Rauf to finish the thing. Eventually, the choice became brutally simple: either complete This Monologue Conversation or risk leaving an almost-finished album sitting indefinitely on a hard drive.
The deciding factor was apparently not ambition, commercial opportunity or career strategy.
The songs were simply too good to leave unheard.
Guillaume Doussaud ultimately mixed and mastered the record, bringing together material recorded across different locations and different phases of the band's life and giving it the cohesion required to finally make it into the world.
The title continues the band's tradition of contradiction. Their debut was This Statement Is False, followed by The Solution Is The Problem. This Monologue Conversation is therefore less a title than another instalment in I Plead Irony's ongoing argument with logic.
It was reportedly borrowed from the words of a whisky vlogger.
Of course it was.
But the album's most revealing contradiction comes with “Falling Upwards,” the final song written for the record and its unexpected movement towards hope. After so much darkness, anxiety and self-examination, the song introduces the possibility that love can change the direction of a life.
Except the narrator isn't climbing upwards.
He's falling upwards.
It's a wonderfully I Plead Irony idea. There is no heroic struggle, no grand act of willpower, no carefully constructed route towards redemption. Falling requires no effort. The lift comes from somewhere else — from love, connection and another person.
And perhaps that is the most appropriate conclusion to an album that took ten years to complete.
This Monologue Conversation is ultimately less about the difficulties that delayed it than about the thing that made those difficulties irrelevant: friendship, music and the stubborn belief that the songs still mattered.
Three friends started making these songs years ago. Lives changed. Distance intervened. A pandemic arrived. The band disappeared for a while. The album sat unfinished.
Yet somehow, the conversation continued.
Ten years is an absurdly long time to make a rock album.
But then, this is I Plead Irony.
And This Monologue Conversation may just be their best contradiction yet: an album about disconnection made possible by connection, a record about falling that ends on an upward trajectory, and a difficult third album that, against considerable odds, finally got finished.
Have a listen and connect with I Plead Irony:
