KNEECAP: "Hopefully there will be a newer version of us, coming up behind us – somebody else who’s doing something in the Irish language that nobody’s seen before"

High Court hearings, travel bans, condemnation from world leaders, and chart races with Michael Jackson probably didn’t feature too prominently on KNEECAP’s agenda, when they first emerged out of a small, creative subculture of session-hosting, Buckfast-drinking young Gaeilgeoirs in West Belfast, the guts of a decade ago. In fact, as they told Hot Press back in 2022, their main motivation back then was “trying to get free festival tickets” – and they found that “the best thing to do was start a group.”

KNEECAP have since, as you might be aware, found their way into quite a few festivals, including Glastonbury and Coachella – sparking international headlines and political outrage in the process, while also emerging as one of the most important and unwavering voices of solidarity and protest in modern music.

Through it all, however, the group’s tricolour-headed Derry man, DJ Próvaí – also known as JJ Ó Dochartaigh – reckons “the philosophy has stayed the same.”

“We’re still getting free tickets, getting to play the festivals, seeing our favourite acts, and getting to meet them as well,” he says. “Long may it continue – especially with the cost of some of them!

“We started as a band,” he adds. “And we are just a band. But people come to us now nearly as a political listening post.”

That said, activism has been part of DJ Próvaí, Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara’s DNA from the earliest days of KNEECAP – even when their lyrical content mostly revolved around mad, MDMA-fuelled sessions.

The title of their debut single ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’, released in late 2017, was inspired by a piece of graffiti calling for Irish language rights. The trio have also been closely involved with ACLAÍ Palestine – a community gym in the occupied West Bank – and its various fundraising efforts since 2019. They’ve made no secret of their anti-imperialist and anti-fascist standpoints either – from travelling to Cuba as part of the Nuestra América humanitarian aid convoy earlier this year, in response to Trump’s oil blockade, to speaking out against the rise of the far-right closer to home.

These are positions that have been directly shaped by KNEECAP’s experiences growing up in the North, and in particular attending Irish language schools, set up independently by local people in their communities, in an effort to reclaim their culture and identity.

That sense of reclamation is also at the heart of their new album, FENIAN – as they proudly embrace a word so often used as a derogatory term for the Irish, and connect it back to its proud roots in Irish folklore.

But the album – which follows 2024’s Fine Art, and the group’s award-winning biopic, released the same year – doesn’t shy away from the chaos and challenges that have defined these past few years for KNEECAP. ‘Carnival’ delves directly into Mo Chara’s highly publicised terrorism case, in which he was accused of holding up a Hezbollah flag at an English gig. As DJ Próvaí remarks, “justice and sense prevailed.” The case was thrown out of a London court last year, with the Crown Prosecution Service going on to lose its appeal over the decision two months ago.

The lyrics describe the charge as being part of a “circus of distractions” concocted by the British government during a genocide in Gaza: “International law is gone out the window/ Fucking listen – all this killing, you’re complicit…”

“Because of the couple of years that preceded it, we had a lot of stuff to draw on,” Próvaí says of FENIAN. “Like the lads say – you have your whole life to write your first album and you’ve got a year to write your second. But luckily enough for us, we weren’t short of subject matter.”

Attending court, he tells me, “was very surreal – like something that you’d see in a movie.”

“Trying to get into the court, you had 100 camera people running at you,” he recalls. “It felt like a scene from Lord Of The Rings or something – when the fella runs through the crowd with the big torch on fire, to blow up the wall. Not that we were trying to blow up the court – just in case another charge should arise there!

“All that is reflected on the album,” he adds. “You’ve got all that stuff about the carnival that happened with the court cases, and having all these people out supporting us in the middle of London – these people who stood by us the whole time, which we’re very thankful for.”

Although they’ve been banned from entire countries – and have made few friends among the political establishment, the pro-Israel lobby, or the far-right over the past few years – it appears to have had little impact on KNEECAP’s ability to sell out tour dates all around them, or secure major festival slots and headline shows across Ireland, Europe, the UK and Japan this summer. Clearly, support for the trio has only continued to grow – with an online following that has now swelled into the millions, and a global fanbase that includes like-minded artists such as Massive Attack and Paul Weller.

This month, that support also powered them straight to the top of the charts – with FENIAN debuting at No.1 in Ireland and No.2 in the UK.

“Michael Jackson made a comeback from the dead, Thriller-style, to beat us into second place,” Próvaí laughs. “That was kind of funny as well, having an album called FENIAN, that gets to No.2 in the charts in England – in the belly of the beast. It’s funny just hearing it on the radio – all these radio DJs going, ‘And that’s FENIAN…’

“We were delighted to get No.1 in Ireland,” he continues. “We had just got home that day, so I just went out for food with the family, and fell asleep! It’s not the celebrations we used to have…”

The few weeks around the release of the album saw the trio embark on a busy run of intimate album launch shows in Ireland, England and Scotland.

“They can be hard ones, doing all new tracks,” DJ Próvaí acknowledges. “You never know which ones are going to land. The first one we did in Belfast was probably the hardest, because we’re still learning bits of the songs, and the audience haven’t heard them.

“But it was good to get it out on the road,” he continues. “We know now which ones are crowd pleasers, and which ones people are gravitating towards.”

It was a special moment for the group, to see FENIAN become the highest-ranking Irish language album in UK chart history – with KNEECAP deciding to donate their earnings from that first week of UK album sales to two Irish language centres in Belfast, Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich and Glór na Móna, as well as the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Their chart success has also served to prove, you could argue, just how out of touch Keir Starmer is, with the UK Prime Minister having referred to KNEECAP as “completely intolerable” just a few months ago –  a quote which, in typical form, the trio have proudly emblazoned on posters and murals. The very same day that the charts were revealed, Labour also had to contend with massive losses in the local elections – leaving Starmer facing serious pressure to step down.

“Keir Starmer – he’s out of touch and he’s out of time as well, it seems,” Próvaí remarks. “Pardon the song lyric! But he seems to be on his way out, the poor fella. It all seems to have backfired on him. Maybe he should’ve spent his time better, dealing with actual problems – instead of trying to create some.

“It’s good to see the SNP flying in Scotland, and Plaid Cymru doing well in Wales,” he adds. “The world seems to be healing. A united Ireland is on the way, and we’re at No.1 – happy days!”

The way DJ Próvaí sees it, KNEECAP’s popularity is “part of a bigger movement.”

“It’s great to see that there’s more people speaking the Irish language now – it’s a bigger thing that’s happening, and we’re just one branch of it,” he reflects. “And it’s great to see that more people are talking about Palestine, and aren’t afraid to challenge the authorities as well.”

While there is always the potential for backlash, if you put yourself out there and speak out, he reckons “you just have to take it in your stride” – something KNEECAP know better than most.

Still, there’s a notable shift in tone on FENIAN, compared to Fine Art. The new album, which they recorded with in-demand English producer Dan Carey,  explores a more complex, sinister world, as KNEECAP found themselves grappling with life, loss and the heavier side of success.

“We had Toddla T on the first one, who’s a brilliant producer,” Próvaí explains. “We just went in a different direction with Dan. Some of it has this darker, industrial sound – which kind of reflects the mood that was there, when the album was being made.”

One of the album’s most powerful moments comes at the very end, with KNEECAP taking listeners deeper into their world on the fearlessly vulnerable ‘Irish Goodbye’ –  which finds Móglaí Bap, aka Naoise Ó Cairealláin, reflecting on the death of his mother, Irish language activist Aoife Ní Riain, and the profoundly difficult weight of grief that comes with losing a loved one to suicide.

“Suicide is such a complex thing,” Naoise said in an Instagram post, coinciding with the release of the video for ‘Irish Goodbye’. “It’s hard to confront the reality of what has happened. When you’re trying to deal with it, you get caught in this in-between world; you understand and then you don’t understand, you’re sad and then you’re angry, there’s shame and there’s guilt. There’s grief, of course, but it’s a specific kind of grief. You feel like you’re carrying this weird, other burden.

“It’s a very hard conversation to have,” he added. “Who the fuck wants to talk about it, really? Death is depressing enough. But we need to talk about it, because we have to alleviate that extra burden of shame and guilt on top of the burden of grief…”

Naoise found that therapy helped him cope with that burden.

“You can’t carry this stuff around with you and blame yourself,” he concluded the post. “It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. It’s about the process of dealing with it. And you can deal with it. You can.”

“Naoise dug deep for that one, fair play to him,” Próvaí reflects. “He’s had a tough few years, with personal stuff – and he put a lot of himself into that, in how he approached it. And then Thomas James came on board for the video. It seems to have resonated with a lot of people. There’s a lot of people taking solace from it, and a lot of people thanking him for shining a light on something that’s not really spoken about.

“If it’s able to help one person, then that’s it – it’s done its job. I’m sure it will help a lot more than that as well.”

It’s now reported that more people in the North have died by suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed during the entirety of the Troubles.

“It’s a legacy of the Troubles,” he says of those devastating suicide rates. “It’s also a long-lasting legacy of hundreds of years of colonialism. You can’t just brutalise a people, and then expect them to come out the other side without having any mental problems.

“The problem is, there’s not enough help out there for people,” he continues. “The government are severely lacking in their approach to it. That’s why I think we need to build more community hubs – where people are able to talk openly about these things, and deal with their problems. And the people themselves need to do it, for their own communities, and their own families and friends – until something better is put in place by the government. But if you’re waiting for the government to give you a helping hand, you’ll be waiting a long time. So it would be good for people to take it into their own hands.”

Back in 2019, DJ Próvaí opened up about his own mental health struggles on his solo album, The Suicidal Ramblings Of A Happy Mad Man – written, under the alias Losta Plot, after experiencing drug-induced psychosis.

“That was a kind of catharsis, doing that,” he tells me now. “It all happened within the space of a couple of weeks – I put that stuff out and never really looked at it again. It would be nice maybe to return to it sometime, but it’s taken a back-burner for now.”

Kneecap at 3Arena on December 16th, 2025. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

As a project, KNEECAP has always been a unique blend of all three members’ varied musical backgrounds and tastes – resulting in a genre-bending sound that transcends easy categorisation, and reflects an ever-diversifying Irish music scene. That sonic world has been expanded even further on FENIAN – which features a sample of RÓIS’s ‘CAOINE’, as well as Radie Peat of Lankum interpolating John Martyn’s ‘Cocain’.

“RÓIS and Radie are powerhouses in themselves,” Próvaí notes. “If you ever see them live, you can see that for yourself. It was about getting some of the best musicians that we know on the tracks – someone who’s going to really add to it. And both of them really did – and Fawzi and Kae Tempest as well.”

He’s got plenty of other Irish artists on his radar too:

“There’s the obvious ones, like Fontaines. Junior Brother as well. Madra Salach are doing big things, and The Scratch and The Mary Wallopers, of course. The Derry band Dirty Faces are another good one – there’s some great talent coming out of Ireland.”

DJ Próvaí shared his reflections on another Irish favourite back in 2019, for the special 1000th issue of Hot Press – contributing to our classic albums feature with an only slightly tongue-in-cheek piece about the 1975 LP The Band Of An Garda Síochána.

“Well, they’ve haven’t released anything since then,” he points out now. “They could be one and done, who knows? One-hit wonders – they hit with a baton, and that’s it. But keep an eye out for them, they’re busy boys and girls…”

As for KNEECAP’s next steps, Próvaí hopes to see further collaborations down the line, and a chance to “see a bit more of the world,” as they take their music to a wider audience.

“And then, hopefully, there will be a newer version of us, coming up behind us,” he reflects. “Somebody else who’s doing something in the Irish language that’s completely new, and nobody’s seen before. That’s what we hope to see.

“But not too soon,” he adds. “We’ve still got a few things to do…”

• FENIAN is out now. KNEECAP’s upcoming Irish shows include headline sets at Live At The Marquee, Cork (July 6) and All Together Now, Co. Waterford (July 30 – August 2). See their full list of dates here.