The Rutz is like any great pub in Belfast, or anywhere in Ireland for that matter: Kinda dingy, people stumbling out of the bathrooms, wiping powder off their faces, traditional Irish music playing loud on the speakers.
“It’s one of those places where you never go for one pint — you’re always stuck there for longer,” says Móglaí Bap, one-third of the Belfast rap trio Kneecap.
“The pubs here are like lobster pots,” adds Mo Chara. “You can get in them, but you can’t get out.”
Well, technically, you can’t even get in the Rutz. Not because it’s some exclusive, ritzy spot — God forbid — or even the kind of local joint that regulars have every right to gatekeep. It’s because the Rutz doesn’t exist. It’s the setting Kneecap conjured for their debut album, Fine Art, out June 14 via Heavenly Recordings. Storytellers at their core, Kneecap wanted to make a concept album that was based in a single location, yet could encapsulate the band’s entire world. The choice was clear.
“There was no more obvious place than a pub,” Móglaí Bap says.
Fine Art has been a long time coming for Kneecap, which comprises vocalists Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara along with DJ Próvaí, rarely seen without his green, orange, and white balaclava. The trio broke through in 2017 with their debut single, “C.E.A.R.T.A.,” an infectious bit of throwback hip-hop with a twist that was novel to most, but natural for them: Lyrics in Ireland’s native language (“Cearta” means “rights”). After that, their recorded output slowed — just a 2018 mixtape, 3cag, and scattered singles — but songs like “Get Your Brits Out,” “Amach Anocht,” and “Mam” showcased an ability to switch between sharp satire, unabashed party raps, and tender vulnerability. Meanwhile, they toured regularly, thrilling audiences with rowdy shows, and found time to co-write and star in a semi-autobiographical movie. (Kneecap, which co-stars Michael Fassbender as Móglaí Bap’s dad, just became the first Irish-language film to premiere at Sundance, where it won the NEXT Audience Award and was purchased by Sony Pictures Classic.)
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A mess of riled-up pundits and politicians have come trailing in Kneecap’s wake, making the band a culture-war flashpoint in Northern Ireland, whose status as a British colony remains highly sensitive. (Case in point: Kneecap never refer to their home as “Northern Ireland,” the name that appears on most maps — it’s “the North of Ireland.”) Northern Loyalists and U.K. conservatives obviously don’t like them because of the strong Irish republican bent of their politics; but the group has also drawn the ire of some people you might expect to be on their side, whether traditionalists wary of how they use the Irish language in their music, or dissident republicans who fiercely object to lyrics about drugs.
Kneecap, who named their band after the IRA practice of doling out kneecappings as punishments for pushing drugs during the Troubles, happily embrace the ire from all sides. They ultimately push a politics centered around working-class people, and their music is more invested in how those people — themselves included — live their lives.
The title track to Fine Art was the first thing Kneecap made after connecting with English producer Toddla T in 2023. Móglaí Bap says T encouraged the band to “look introspectively into Ireland and our story, what’s happened, and what we can pick out — the bits of culture, bits of news, and stuff.” That day, they homed in on the media firestorm they caused in 2022 after unveiling a mural in Belfast depicting a burning police car with the slogan “Níl fáilte roimh an RUC” (meaning “The Royal Ulster Constabulary is not welcome”).
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As a statement, the mural was mostly just anti-police. “People have no love for the police over here,” DJ Próvaí says, comparing their presence in impoverished, underrepresented areas of Belfast — whether Catholic or Protestant — to their presence in impoverished, underrepresented areas of the United States. “They’ve got the same struggles.”
But the use of “RUC” in the mural was a pointed choice, because the Royal Ulster Constabulary — the police service that played an outsized role as an arm of the British state, largely targeting republicans and Catholics, during the Troubles — technically no longer exists. It was replaced in 2001 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) following the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the Troubles in 1998 after decades of violence. RUC remains a kind of shorthand, though, a deeply ingrained part of the cultural vernacular, and Kneecap’s use of it was more bullhorn than dog whistle for the people they love to annoy (and who seem to love being annoyed by them). Stephen Nolan, a longtime BBC Northern Ireland presenter, whom Mo Chara has compared to a Piers Morgan-type figure, addressed the mural on his show, remarking, “Rappers Kneecap say the mural was unveiled as just a piece of… fine art.”
That audio clip provided “Fine Art” with the perfect delirious drop.
Kneecap had already written a bunch of songs they figured would comprise their debut album, but after making “Fine Art,” they scrapped it all to build something new with Toddla T. “The moment had passed” with those old songs, Mo Chara says. “Just being in the studio with T was a feeling in and of itself — whatever preconceived ideas we had for the album changed when we got in the room with him.”
Specifically, Toddla T convinced the band to take a moment and reflect, rather than plow forward, for their debut. “We’ve been playing music for five years, so you’re at that point where you want to try something a bit new, or move on from something,” Mo Chara says. “We were maybe a bit too out-there with the first songs we were writing. T was good at reeling us back in, like, ‘No, you’ve gotta simplify this for your first album. Introduce people to Kneecap’s world.’”
That world on Fine Art is massive and chaotic, in all the best ways. The album’s pacing and energy are drawn from Kneecap’s live shows, while the ambiance of the Rutz comes through in sketches like “Chaps,” where Toddla T voices the slimiest London record exec you can imagine, or “State of Ya,” where the great BBC DJ Annie Mac (who’s married to T in real life) ribs Mo Chara for failing to wipe all the blow off his face.
Rap tracks (“Sick in the Head,” “Drug Dealing Pagans”) sit alongside blasts of punk (“I’m Flush,” “Rhino Ket”) and various strains of rave music (“Parful,” “Ibh Fiacha Linne”). The guests are equally varied: Grian Chatten and Tom Coll of Irish post-punks Fontaines D.C. appear on the first single, “Better Way to Live”; London MC Jelani Blackman anchors standout “Harrow Road”; and Radie Peat of the Irish folk band Lankum lends her voice to “3CAG,” which heavily samples the 1977 song “Caravan,” by Joe O’Donnell, a Celtic rock musician known for his inventive experiments with traditional Irish music.
The key to Fine Art’s cohesion lies here, and in the grimy confines of the Rutz, where fiddles dance over the din and drunken voices suddenly cohere into the folk song “Amhrán Na Scadán.” As Mo Chara puts it, “The whole album is set in a pub, and if there’s no trad on, it’s not a great pub.”
DJ Próvaí adds, “The energy of trad music is really infectious. You can feel that through the album.”
Another major influence was Desmond Bell’s Dancing on Narrow Ground: Youth & Dance in Ulster, a documentary from the mid-’90s made for British TV, but never aired. It eventually made its way online, its samizdat aura heightened by its content: a bleary, ebullient depiction of how raves (and copious amounts of MDMA) helped bridge sectarian divides among young people in the North of Ireland during the final years of the Troubles. Kneecap sampled interviews from the film on “Parful” and are striving to cultivate that same spirit around themselves.
“That’s the way we want our gigs to be,” says Mo Chara. “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from. Just because we rap in Irish and might not align with your political views — we can be friends with people that we don’t align with politically.”
This magnanimity won’t surprise anyone who’s read an interview with Kneecap over the past six years, or engaged with them at a level deeper than the superficial projections of tabloid papers or attention-hungry politicians. Móglaí Bap frequently recounts a story where he and a friend went to a 12th of July march — a major annual Protestant/loyalist event — and a small group started singing “C.E.A.R.T.A” after spotting him in the crowd. He brings it up again after recalling how Naomi Long, former leader of the centrist Alliance Party, suggested that Kneecap’s burning cop car mural was fueling more sectarian hatred.
“If we were breeding sectarian hatred then I’m sure the people down in Sandy Row wouldn’t really like us,” Móglaí Bap counters. “But we were down there, chatting with them, on the ground, between young people. It’s a much different opinion from established politicians.”
The band faced another wave of criticism after the successful premiere of Kneecap at Sundance. Members of the conservative Democratic Unionist Party decried the public funding the project received, with MP Ian Paisley even accusing Kneecap of “rewriting and glorifying… the sectarian war of hate by the IRA.” (Kneecap responded by offering to host free screenings for DUP members: “We will send popcorn and fizzy drinks too.” Móglaí Bap notes that those same 12th of July celebrations also receive public funding.)
This is not to deny, or downplay, Kneecap’s staunch Irish nationalist politics. And it’s true they’re willing to play with signifiers that recall the Troubles (like Próvaí’s balaclava) and toe lines — or, maybe, snort them is a better way to put it — that remain historically fraught in the North. But their politics ultimately feed a worldview that’s inclusive, anti-colonial, and conscious of the ways that sectarianism has been used to break working-class solidarity. Meanwhile, many of their critics seem to see Kneecap’s very use of the Irish language as an inherently politically divisive act, rather than just something Irish speakers would do.
“The two communities in the [nationalist] Falls Road and [loyalist] Shankill suffer from a lot of the same problems — food banks, poverty, suicide,” Moglái Bap says. “The wall, unfortunately, doesn’t stop these things going from one community to another… I think a lot of politicians in the North would rather people focus on certain aspects of us to create division, but there’s a lot more that we have in common.”
“It’s about deconstructing the systems that have created all this poverty, sectarianism, hatred and murder,” Próvaí adds.
There’s a moment in the Kneecap movie where Mo Chara gets into a fight with the Protestant woman he’s been secretly seeing and has to explain that when the band says “Brits out,” it’s not about booting loyalists, unionists, or Protestants, but excising the actual British state from a unified Ireland. When she asks why he didn’t just say that, Mo Chara fires back, “Because it’s the chorus of a fucking song, not the 1916 proclamation!”
Provocation is ideal fuel for creativity, but in a world that runs on outrage, intent often gets burned into exhaust fumes. There are clear benefits to accepting that trade-off, as Kneecap have seen first hand; and while they don’t seem at all interested in toning down their act, they are perhaps getting wary of being misunderstood. Fine Art is an album that, yes, should piss off all the right people, but it’s not all politics. It’s personal, vulnerable, and frivolous, with explorations of mental health sitting side by side with a song whose gloriously rowdy chorus goes, “I’m K-holed off my head, this shit puts rhinos to bed!”
“I think because of where we’re from, everything has to be about politics,” Mo Chara says. “We’re a band, for fuck’s sake. We make music. Obviously, we do things that are political. But I worry that just because we’re a band from Belfast that raps in Irish, any kind of political crisis, they’re like, ‘Oh, let’s fucking ask Kneecap what they think!’”
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That said: When we speak in early February, it’s one day after Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has been sworn in as Northern Ireland’s First Minister, becoming the first republican, nationalist, Catholic politician to hold the office. So it’s with all apologies that we ask how Kneecap feel about this moment. Móglaí Bap replies he’s cautiously hopeful about a working government bringing better social services to the North, and maybe even a border poll down the line.
“And then,” he adds controversially, “it’ll start a whole new system where everybody’s treated nicely.”