Irish rap trio Kneecap today share their new single ‘Fine Art.’ The title track of their debut album produced by Toddla T.
‘Fine Art’ is a frenetic, rapid-fire, hand in the air hip-hop blast, with the band sharing that it was inspired by “the mental reaction of the media to our mural unveiling of a police jeep on fire.”
Mo Chara said:
“The mural ended up on the BBC with Steven Nolan who’s like the Piers Morgan of the North of Ireland. They had a massive debate about the painting, and he says, ‘The band Kneecap claim the mural is just a piece of fine art’. So we sampled it into a dance tune and dropped it in where it kicks. That’s where the title comes from – when we were getting stick about the mural that’s the term we used. Because that’s the best description isn’t it? If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. It’s still fine art.”
After taking this year’s Sundance Film Festival by storm, with their self-titled, Rich Peppiatt directed, semi-biopic film starring Michael Fassbender – notably the festival’s first Irish language film, and subsequent winner of ‘The Audience Award: NEXT’ presented by Adobe. The Kneecap trio made up of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí, followed with their US TV debut, on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show, where they performed previous single ‘Sick In The Head’.
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• READ ALL ABOUT THE ALBUM ‘FINE ART’ •
• TRACKLIST • PRE-ORDER THE VINYL OR CD • RELEASED JUNE 14TH, 2024. •
When Mo Chara, Moglaí Bap and DJ Provaí – aka Belfast’s finest 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 record. Instead, they decided to build a pub together.
Built on a West Belfast side street, The Rutz is a community boozer, in that the entire community uses it. All human life is inside, either thriving, striving or skiving. There’s people just trying to get served at the bar or up on the stage performing; others are slumped in darkened corners or emerging bleary eyed and coke smeared from the toilets. Religious affiliations are irrelevant and the chatter is a intoxicating blur of English and Irish.
Although the pub is currently just a figment of the band’s imagination, all of the action on Kneecap’s exhilarating first album – Fine Art – takes place in The Rutz. Like the band themselves, Fine Art is fiercely intelligent, consistently hilarious and genuinely thought provoking. It’s genius is to immerse you in a world thus far unrepresented in modern music.
Across the record’s twelve tracks and the interconnecting moments between them (recorded by the band and friends including DJ Annie Mac), the pub comes to life vividly, providing the perfect backdrop for the cast of characters that join the dots throughout the album. From the moment the idea was born back in Toddla T’s studio, it was the obvious location to base the world of Kneecap in.
Kneecap are half-way through embarking on their sold out North American tour. They will be visiting Europe and the UK later this year, with several summer festival appearances including Glastonbury Festival.
• KNEECAP TOUR DATES AND TICKETS •
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