Debut album 'FINE ART' is now available on Heavenly Recordings. 'KNEECAP: A FILM BY RICH PEPPIATT' premiered in Irish cinemas on Thursday 8 August.
When Mo Chara, Moglaí Bap and DJ Provaí – also known as Belfast's best Kneecap – entered the studio with producer Toddla T in the summer of 2023, they quickly decided to scrap everything they had already prepared for the album they were about to release. engrave. Instead, they decided to build a pub together.
Built on a side street in west Belfast, The Rutz is a community pub as the entire community uses it. All human life is within, whether thriving, striving or dodging. There are people who simply try to be served at the bar or on stage performing; others are slumped in dark corners or emerge from bathrooms with cloudy eyes and smeared coke. Religious affiliations are irrelevant and the chatter is a heady mix of English and Irish.
At night, the music is loud and effortlessly changes styles. There is an ethereal Irish folk song with fast rhythms that verge on a propulsive dubstep and vibrant bass. There are rave record samples playing at panic-inducing volume and there's mindless funk that seems to seep through the speakers like liquid. Two pints inside you and forty minutes spent here are absolutely fascinating.
Although the pub is currently just a figment of the band's imagination, all the action on Kneecap's exciting first album, Fine Art, takes place at The Rutz. Like the band themselves, Fine Art is fiercely intelligent, consistently hilarious and genuinely thought-provoking. Its genius is to immerse you in a world hitherto not represented in modern music.
Throughout the album's twelve tracks and the moments of interconnection between them (recorded by the band and friends, including DJ Annie Mac), the pub comes vividly to life, providing the perfect backdrop for the cast of characters that bring the two together. points throughout the album. From the moment the idea was born in Toddla T's studio, it was the obvious place to base the world of Kneecap.
Mo Chara “We had been writing an album for about two years. We had grown much faster as a band than we were developing our production skills. We had big crowds at shows and knew we needed a bigger producer. When we went into the studio with Toddla T, we threw out every song we had and started from scratch. T's idea was to tell the story of Kneecap. So the album was conceived as the listener's passage into the world of Kneecap. From there came the idea of setting everything in a pub. At the beginning you walk into a pub, there's someone offering you a drink, there's a song… it's actually us holding your hand and leading you into our world.”
Moglai Bap “You're there enjoying a pint at the start of the night, then you go to the toilet and someone offers you cocaine, you go out and have a cigarette and bump into new people and all the while, the mood and energy stays the same. Changing…”
Mo Chara “The challenge was to show versatility in all genres of hip hop. We wanted to do all of that while still sounding cohesive. The pub was a really good way to bring everything together.”
Kneecap's story began in 2017 with the release of their first single: CEARTA (Irish for rights). The lyrics document a near-miss with the RUC on the way to the party, loaded with enough illegal substances to justify a stretch inside. While the song was quickly banned by Irish radio station RTE for “referencing drugs and swearing”, CEARTA saw the band help usher Irish into the modern era thanks to some much-needed creativity with terminology.
Mo Chara “We are Irish speakers and live in an urban area, the first or second generation to be born in the city. It is traditionally a rural language after colonialism expelled it westwards towards the sea. We wanted to bring the Irish language into the modern era by incorporating aspects of youth culture into it. There is a different lifestyle in the city than in rural areas. There were no words for drugs in the Irish language, so we had to make them up. We recycle old words and apply them to modern things. “That is part of the world we want to create, where the Irish language is central and modern.”
Moglai Bap “The nice thing about Kneecap is that we don't just piss off people from unionist backgrounds, we also piss off people from the Irish community… We don't discriminate who we piss off. There are conservative people in the Irish language community who think that the language should be maintained as an ancient language in all its beauty. They think we are ruining the language with the words we use. But you start to hear young people use some of the words we use in our songs, referring to drugs or party life. “It seems like we are having a positive effect on youth culture.”
This positive effect manifests itself fine art. A hip hop album in the sense that the glorious expansion of check your head That's right, his approach to modern music is magpie-like, reflecting how a night of music might evolve at a festival, or within the right kind of pub. Where the band's previous mixtape 3cag reflected life and problems in Ireland at the time of recording, fine art It was always intended to be about the band itself.
opening with 3CAG (unrelated to the previous mixtape) – A beautifully spectral scene featuring the vocals of Lankum's Radie Peat (Mo Chara: “She's the Queen of Ireland at the moment, it's a pleasure to have her on the album.”) – the album quickly shifts into a couple of different gears on the title track, which features dialogue taken from an Irish TV show where a local presenter talks about a mural the band had painted in their hometown showing an RUC jeep on fire along with the message. ““Níl fáilte roimh an RUC” (translation: “The RUC are not welcome”).
Mo Chara “The mural ended up on the BBC with Steven Nolan, who is like the Piers Morgan of the north of Ireland. They had a massive debate about the painting and he says, “The band Kneecap claims the mural is just a work of art.” So we tried it on a dance tune and put it where it kicks. That's where the title comes from: when we insist on talking about the mural, that's the term we use. Because that's the best description, right? If you don't understand it, you don't understand it. “It’s still fine art.”
Elsewhere on tracks like I bhFiacha Linne and Ket Rhino, the spirit of the early '90s rave scene is brilliantly captured and combined with the frenetic energy of 21st century club music. Although the two rappers were too young to have participated in the open-air egalitarian raves that united Catholics and Protestants in the years before the Good Friday Agreement, they were greatly inspired by a documentary from that era (Dancing on Narrow Ground: Youth & Dance). in UIster).
Moglai Bap “That movie is about how they all took really strong ecstasy pills and had a great time together. It seemed like that mythical land where the pills were so strong that you only needed one all night. All the music from that movie ended up leaking onto the record because we all loved watching it. The song Parful also shows it.”
Mo Chara “There were bombings during the week and on the weekend people gathered to drink Es. It didn't matter where they were from. Then the week would begin again and they would kill each other again. The contrast from life was huge, but the rave scene really started to change things.”
Much less the sound of getting lost dancing in a field, the first single from Fine arts (better way to live) I'd feel more at home playing the jukebox in The Rutz's cozy bar. An irresistible murky late-night groove, the track sees the band joined by Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC (alongside that band's drummer, Tom Coll), who perfectly captures the slide down the bar stool from sobriety to drunken indifference. .
Moglai Bap “We are good friends with Grian and Tom, we have played with them before. We wanted them to appear on the record, so one night we got them drunk and made them sign the contract in the pub. After that, they are obligated to do it.”
It is unknown if the alcohol bribes were necessary, as Grian, like Radie, Annie and Harrow Road guest Jelani Blackman (Mo Chara: “It sounds like shit and is criminally underrated) and everyone else who appears in Fine Art, they feel at home in the environment. . It's a testament to how welcoming the world Kneecap has built around him. Then you might as well go to the bar, have another pint and maybe a shot of Baby Guinness too. And don't worry about the last orders, the blockage will last all night.
BALL JOINT
BELFAST, SSE ARENA
SAT DECEMBER 21, 2024
TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY, JUNE 21 AT 10AM VIA TICKETMASTER.ES & WWW.SSEARENABELFAST.COM
thanks to our partners at www.xsnoize.com
