Direct, rapid, cutting... all easy adjectives to describe Sprints, a garage punk combo already making their mark on the year 2024 that has barely begun. After releasing back-to-back EPs, A Modern Job and Manifesto, on the intimate UK label Nice Swan, the young Dublin quartet went on to record their first album with their more high-profile Berlin counterpart, City Slang (Calexico, Hauschka, Gold Panda, Tindersticks and Anna von Hausswolff).
Behind charismatic frontwoman Karla Chubb are three men: Colm O’Reilly on guitar, Jack Callan on drums and Sam McCann on bass. The band embraced their sonic identity after being slapped in the face at a gig by Savages, Jehnny Beth’s edgy, slick rock all-female band, now on hiatus but at the height of their glory at the time. Having decided, whatever the cost, to take responsibility for themselves, the quartet has now hardened its line, choosing to exorcise its inner wounds and move towards a more abrasive sound. “I’ve always loved music fuelled by anger, but I’d fallen into the trap of writing what I thought was the least offensive, simply because I saw it as a negative emotion, rather than something that could be therapeutic and cathartic,” explains the Irish singer.
Motorik rhythms, saturations galore, a constant build-up of power to the point of implosion, each track contains its own ticking time bomb, ready to explode in a great sonic deluge. From start to finish, the would-be punk priestess sings of her intimate wounds in her sandpaper voice, only calming down on the title track that closes the record. Sometimes frankly garage punk, sometimes more 90′s grunge or post-punk, these textures were manipulated by Daniel Fox, the bassist from Gilla Band, now producing a bunch of noise-influenced albums. Recorded in just 12 days at Black Box Studio, a barn lost in the Loire Valley and filled with vintage equipment, this little gem positions Sprints as one of the rock bands to watch very closely in 2024.
