About
File under
Savages, Fucked Up, IDLES
Free style
Gritty, personal garage punk
" Punk-edged shades of deeply personal darkness "
“The breaks I’ve taken from music were the most difficult times of my life”, SPRINTS’ frontwoman Karla Chubb said early in the Dublin band’s lifespan, and given the cathartic content of the band’s output, that particular revelation is far from surprising. Grabbing hold of the maxim that the personal and the political are endlessly intertwined, SPRINTS air their grievances in a visceral, embittered form, alternating as they do so between the styles of Nirvana and Bikini Kill, Savages and local heroes Fontaines DC, with a stop off at the edgier end of spoken word exploration.
The entire concept comes from three of SPRINTS’ members, at the time playing in the dying embers of a former band back in 2016, attending a Savages show and jointly seeing where their future lay. Despite the tone being set, the early singles were markedly less ferocious than their current offerings. Early output ‘Kissing Practice’, for example, sets any hint at brutal blandness aside and goes personal and charismatic.
From there, a reputation for heady live shows and lyrical dynamism in amongst pulsating riffs and pace changes powered the four-piece onwards, via a quick-selling ‘Back Catalogue’ LP collecting all their work to the massive early 2024 release ‘Letter To Self’. The latter is a profoundly stark and viscous album loaded with feeling, and one that catapulted SPRINTS from a status as massive domestic scene stars to international ‘ones to watch’.
With the praise of essentially the entire rock music press behind them, the record is a deeply personal ode to turning life’s challenges into a superpower, life’s difficulties into art. Chubb’s once “constant state of existential crisis” is now a deeply relatable and yet challenging record that treds into Irish political questions, serves as an extension of Chubb’s self, has a blistering pace and enthralls, touching on engaging and self-aware angles without ever pulling a single soul-eviscerating punch.
SPRINTS is angry music delivered entirely without a filter, danceably lively and dabbled with occasional moments of levity. It is, in short, starkly original, captivating, and serves as yet another crowning moment for the explosive Irish post-punk scene.
