SPRINTS
There's a lyric burnt into ‘Abandon' - the slow, searing scorch of an opening track that begins SPRINTS' gargantuan second album ‘All That Is Over' - that cuts to the core of the incendiary Dublin quartet right now: "I don't grow old / I grow unrecognisable".
Not only does it kick the door down to a record that wrestles with the horrors outside and the strengths within, planting its feet in the ground and fighting for the necessity of art and hope and love amidst an incomprehensible world on fire, it also neatly winks at SPRINTS' own thrilling trajectory. Having underlined their status as one of the UK and Ireland's most exciting breakthrough bands with their universally-acclaimed 2024 debut ‘Letter To Self', now vocalist and guitarist Karla Chubb, bassist Sam McCann, drummer Jack Callan and new guitarist Zac Stephenson are returning for their second act as an evolved entity: stronger, sharper and fully assured. "I think we came out of 2024 as quite literally different people and a completely different band to how we entered it," says Karla. "There was a lot of growing and a lot of work on myself, and in the background we did a lot of work as friends and on being there for each other as a band. Album One was so riddled with self-consciousness and a need to prove myself in a very male-dominated industry that really held me back in a lot of ways. And now, on this album, I could not give less of a fuck."
The groundwork that SPRINTS laid down with their debut marked them out as a musical triple threat amongst the alternative landscape: a visceral live band capable of selling out increasingly sizeable tours, who could earn five star reviews (NME, DIY and more) and an Irish Choice Music Prize nod from critical corners but also land themselves on BBC Radio One. Throughout 2024 alone, they toured the UK, Europe and America twice, ending the year with a celebratory, sold-out show at London's O2 Forum Kentish Town.
All the while as their crowds were growing, however, SPRINTS were having to reconfigure themselves from the inside. At the end of their April UK tour, original guitarist Colm O'Reilly stepped back from the band; with a full summer of festivals ahead, the remainingembers had barely two weeks to figure out a plan. "Zac had already filled in at The Great Escape so he knew five songs and it was like, ‘Great, that's five more than anyone else knows!'" Karla laughs. "And honestly, I think it was the most serendipitous thing where the universe was conspiring with us." "I was about to start my first big boy job the day before Karla messaged me. It felt like there was some deeper meaning to that," Zac nods.
‘All That Is Over' is a remarkable record in itself - a second album that pushes the dynamics of the band into richer territory, finding new space and nuance but also going harder than ever. However there's a potency born from the "baptism of fire" beginnings of their current line-up that infuses SPRINTS' second with a whole new energy. "By the time we ended up working on new stuff, we'd played so many shows together that the natural chemistry me, Karla and Sam had built up over years, Zac had very quickly developed too," Jack says. Where many bands would find themselves burnt out and needing a break after such a hectic period of time, in the midst of the whirlwind, Karla found herself becoming more prolific than ever. "There was just so much happening and so much to process," she explains. "I was going through a big break up with my partner who I'd been with for eight years; Colm had left the band; we'd really progressed into being professional musicians, and I was at the start of a new relationship. But then you'd look outside and it's like the world has never been uglier. I was writing every day because there was so much going on."
It's into this landscape of duality and disparity, anger, ambition and a thousand feelings in between that ‘All That Is Over' lays out its cards. Its title is taken from a lyric at the centre of ‘Beg': an uncompromising slice of propulsive punk that seeks the cleansing of new beginnings. Written on tour buses, in soundchecks and very much in real time, it's an album set against the backdrop of a litany of atrocities - the war in Gaza, the wildfires in LA, Trump's executive order denying the rights of trans people - that sees SPRINTS trying to make sense of a society gone mad.
"We're very fortunate that we have this beautiful little dysfunctional, insane family that we've built and we're all really madly in love with each other," Karla continues. "It's this liberal, creative bubble, and pursuing the arts is so innately beautiful, but then you step out of it for a second and look at your phone and you're like, ‘What is happening out there?!' The world is so dystopian and we're on the edge of a fucking apocalypse."
First single ‘Descartes' distills this idea into a nerve-shredding blast of sonic ferocity that holds the importance of art and expression high. Inspired by a line in Rachel Cusk's novel Outline - "Vanity is the curse of our culture" - it switches up the philosopher's famous "I think therefore I am" into Karla's own raison d'etre: "I speak so therefore I understand". "A lot of the negativity you see in the world is rooted in vanity and the ego that your beliefs or identity are more important than somebody else's," she says. "‘Descartes' explores the idea that writing for me is not just a tool to make music but a tool to process the world."
‘Abandon' simultaneously channels Dante's Inferno and the nine circles of hell, but also a smaller, sadder sense of displacement from home. "There's the line ‘I used to live here/ I used to love here'," Karla notes. "Sometimes you almost feel like a stranger in your city because you see it change and not always for the better." Meanwhile the self-described "cowboy gothic" musical sensibilities of both ‘Rage' and ‘Desire' began to make sense once these lyrical themes of dystopia started to rear their heads. The former, a Dandy Warhols-esque psych swagger that marks totally new territory for the quartet; the latter, a closing track that combines Radiohead-like build ups and "spaghetti Western noodles" into an outpouring of lust for a new love, both are testament to the bold new ground that SPRINTS' musically tread this time.
On the My Bloody Valentine-influenced shoegaze haze of ‘Better', Sam and Karla share vocals on a towering "anti-love song" that builds to a cathartic, climactic wall of sound. The spidery, sinuous ‘To The Bone', meanwhile, has already become a new live highlight. Produced once more by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, this time at the residential La Frette studio just outside of Paris, the playfulness and spark that rings through the record shows both the band's wealth of ideas and willingness to break fresh ground, but also a new, hard-won confidence.
For Karla, it has been an exercise in shutting down the negative voices, both external and internal: an idea that comes to a head on the fizzing eyeroll of ‘Need'. "We played a headline show in France and, a few days after, I was tagged in a review of the gig where the whole first paragraph was the guy commenting about my weight: ‘Compared to the picture we saw online, she's lost a lot of weight and it definitely suits her better'," she recalls. "Now it's like, I don't really fucking care anymore. People are gonna write articles about the way I look. They're gonna write about my political opinions, they're gonna talk shit anyway. It's always gonna be about me, it's never gonna be the guys, so I might as well fucking embrace it and give them something fun to talk about." Sticking two fingers up whilst doubling down on the visceral spirit of fierce artistic honesty that's always been at the heart of the band, ‘All That Is Over' finds SPRINTS entering their second chapter with nothing left to hold them back.