Almost four years ago to the day, Hot Press published its ‘Hot For 2020’ feature – an annual list of Irish talent tipped for big things over the year ahead. Despite the fact that Covid would soon derail the entire industry, it proved to be a particularly prescient selection, with the genre-spanning class of 2020 featuring leading lights like Denise Chaila, John Francis Flynn, KNEECAP, Rachael Lavelle, Aoife Nessa Frances, TPM (before its members found international success as The Mary Wallopers), and a then relatively lesser-known Dublin four-piece called SPRINTS.

Back then, SPRINTS had just a few tracks to their name, which you’d now have to do some serious internet-digging to unearth. But the excitement surrounding the irrepressibly plucky band was there from the outset – with their high-energy yet big-hearted approach to punk immediately marking them as a special force within Ireland’s increasingly thronged, and endlessly innovative, guitar-band scene.

Making good on that early promise, 2023 saw SPRINTS – made up of lead vocalist Karla Chubb, drummer Jack Callan, guitarist Colm O’Reilly and bassist Sam McCann – sign to the prestigious Berlin-based label City Slang; sell out venues on both sides of the Irish Sea; support Suede across a string of UK shows; and survive an intense summer of balancing weekday 9-5s with weekend festival appearances.

Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

When I meet Karla and Jack on a Friday morning in Dublin, around the release of their debut album, Letter To Self, the singer tells me that she’s finally quit her day job for good, to dedicate herself fully to SPRINTS’ new, high-speed reality.

“It’s terrifying,” Karla acknowledges. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night like, ‘Aaagh! I’ve no income coming in!’ But I’ve saved enough for my rent for the year. And we’re on tour for three months, all through February and straight through until the end of April, so I had to leave anyway. That’s what I’m telling myself: I had to do it!”

“It was grand the first couple of years, juggling the two,” Jack adds. “It was a lot, but you could do it. But this year you’d really feel the strain.”

Having found their touring groove through early trial and error – they now know to avoid hungover puking out of tour van windows – SPRINTS built up a strong international reputation as a live band long before they’d even announced their debut LP.

“In a weird way, Covid benefitted us,” Jack remarks. “We worked on our own sound, and we were able to hit the ground running. During Covid, rehearsing was one of the only things we could do. There was a place we used to go every week, have a bit of a piss up, and jam. It was probably longer than we’ll ever have again, in an extended period, to work on new stuff, and mess around with it.”

Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

They also spent that time putting their energy into physical releases, including two EPs, 2021’s Manifesto and 2022’s A Modern Job, as well as clocking up plenty of radio play.

“That helped us get the word of the band out,” Karla explains. “We’re not really that socially active – or on TikTok, which has broken so many artists in Ireland alone. We’re not cool or young enough!

“But there was such a focus on supporting independent music during that time, because everything was shut down, and people were looking for things to do,” she adds. “So once the floodgates opened, we just ran with it, and played non-stop for about two years solid.”

Getting their hands on physical copies of their debut album felt like a culmination of that journey.

“It’s a moment that you never really think is going to happen,” Karla reflects. “It was mad – holding it, and seeing the physical embodiment of the work.”

Letter To Self our debut album is out now. A labour of love, passion and perseverance. It was ours and now it’s yours. Look after it. Thank you for everything xxxhttps://t.co/ySE1rNjqiG pic.twitter.com/aC1zubTIkz

— SPRINTS (@SPRINTSmusic) January 5, 2024

She describes Letter To Self as “a fun, fast, angry record” – but notes that the longer format of an album also brought out a new, slightly mellower side of the band.

“We thought about the whole album as a live set, so I was like, ‘There has to be some dip, because I physically will not be able to sing at this volume and this pace for an hour-and-a-half straight,’” she recalls. “It’s physically not possible, even if I was the fittest person in the world. I can’t be running around, jumping, playing guitar, and screaming at the top of my lungs. I’m not 20 anymore!”

They once again teamed up with producer Daniel Fox of Gilla Band for the project, capturing their raw gig energy by tracking everything live.

“It’s been really nice developing that relationship with him,” Jack tells me. “We’ve both become much more comfortable with each other. He’s no problem being like, ‘Yeah, that’s a bit shit… Do something else.’ In a good way though! You need that.”

While the four members bring their own unique influences and styles to SPRINTS, they all felt a strong connection to heavy music during their “teen angst” years.

“I was such a stereotypical angry teenager,” Karla laughs. “All black, all the time, and horrible pink streaks at the front of my hair: ‘Don’t talk to me! No one understands me!’”

“Some of us were like, ‘We’re rockers!’ – and some of us were like, ‘No, we’re emos!’” Jack nods. “That was a whole thing.”

“That guitar-driven music will always be our No.1 love,” Karla resumes. “It will always come back to that noise, and that heavier space – Fugazi, Queens of the Stone Age, Savages, Gilla Band... It’s the first thing we put on in the van on tour: System of a Down. After a 6am Ryanair flight, and travelling for five hours, you need a bit of headbanging to get you in the mood.”

With several of the members having played in bands together before joining forces as SPRINTS, they’ve found a special organic chemistry as a group.

“We did a good bit of figuring out the direction we wanted to move in when we were in the previous bands,” Jack explains. “So by the time we started SPRINTS, we had a pretty good idea. In saying that, we sound totally different now – but the idea, and some kind of guiding principle, was there.

“It wasn’t even about the heaviness – it was the energy to it,” he continues. “We wanted it to be really energetic, and that’s still the case today.”

“Internal rage,” Karla smiles wryly. “That’s the crux of it.”

Karla has certainly found songwriting to be a means of catharsis, with tracks like ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ from Letter To Self delving unflinchingly into experiences of trauma and mental health issues. But it’s been a gradual process –  and she tells me that she was “too nervous” to explore such personal themes earlier in her work.

“That’s why Manifesto had a lot of political-leaning moments,” she elaborates. “Then, A Modern Job was focused on our experiences of day-to-day life – the struggle with monotony, and modern existence in general.

“I got the guts to really examine that, and examine why I struggle with those things,” she adds. “That’s where the mental health and anxiety issues came in. So the more I grew into accepting that this was a part of me, as a songwriter, then it became natural. You should write about the things that happened in your life and affected you – because there’s no more honest way to approach writing. It was cathartic, and therapeutic, and it helped me process stuff, especially after two years of being locked in an apartment. It was nice to have something to shout out into the void.”

Will that “internal rage” always be a key force driving SPRINTS?

“For now, yeah,” Karla considers. “It’s rage, but it’s kind of semi-positive. It’s more so a kick-up-the-ass kind of energy, as opposed to, ‘I’m so angry about x, y and z!’”

“And you just got engaged,” Jack says to his bandmate, “so obviously Album 2 is going to be all love songs!”

Jokes about Westlife-style, singing-from-stools numbers in SPRINTS’ future aside, Karla agrees that anger is something many Irish people have struggled with expressing openly, in favour of a ‘sure look...’ position.

“Because we’re all passive!” she says. “There’s also a voice in my head that’s like, ‘Oh, of course – gay, angry woman doing shouty music… How original!’ But I’m like, ‘Fuck it, whatever. Lean into it.’ There’s a lot to be angry about, and there’s a lot that you need to process. There’s a lot of shit that everyone went through over the last couple of years that deserves to be shouted about. It’s not necessarily complaining – it’s healing, and processing. Some people go to therapy, I shout it on stage to a couple of hundred people.”

‘Adore Adore Adore’, for instance, was written in response to a “particularly bad review” of the band, which Karla says focused entirely on her physical appearance and behaviour onstage, as opposed to the music.

“It was very misogynistic,” Jack nods.

“In that sense, it is a political song,” Karla remarks. “Anything related to women, or our rights to equality, or having as much of a voice in a male-dominated genre, is considered inherently political, because you’re fighting the norm. I’ll happily wear that badge, but a lot of it is a tongue-in-cheek critique of those slight nuances and differences you see in how people write about me, or even the questions I might get asked in an interview. Colm would be asked all about his playing, and his instruments and his pedals – and then it’s like, ‘Karla, what’s it like being a woman?’”

“We did an email interview, and one of the questions was, ‘Women in music?’" Jack recalls. "With a question mark.”

“Five of the questions were like: ‘What’s your experience as a woman in music?’” Karla adds. “‘What does women in music these days mean to you?’ ‘How do you get more women in music?’ ‘There’s not a lot of women in rock, but Pillow Queens are women in rock – explain!’ It was like someone was writing a thesis, and they were asking me to do their research on post-modern feminism…”

But as Karla points out herself, some of these issues are central themes in the music: “So I kind of bring it on myself,” she says.

“But how do you balance that?” she continues. “I really want to speak about it. It’s important to have women in these spaces – because when I was growing up, wanting to learn music, there weren’t that many icons to look up to. There was PJ Harvey, Debbie Harry, Stevie Nicks – a limited list of women who managed to break through and get a big voice in that space. So it is important to talk about it, but it’s also not the only thing I am: a woman.”

Just ahead of the release of Letter To Self, SPRINTS opened for Belfast hip-hop group KNEECAP at the Olympia in Dublin – which served as a powerful testament to the genre-criss-crossing, boundary-defying nature of Irish music right now.

“That’s definitely a noticeable difference between here and England,” Jack states. “You go to gigs here, and can see three different genres on the same bill. But often in England, it’s all pretty same-y, in terms of genre. There’s different scenes there, but they seem a bit more separate.

“It might be because Ireland is smaller,” he continues. “But at festivals, when there’s other Irish people on the bill, we always go and see them, whether it’s CMAT, Pillow Queens or KNEECAP.”

“There’s a natural community,” Karla agrees. “But also, look at the genre-span of successful Irish bands – like The Pogues, or The Cranberries, or Gilla Band, or Lankum. There’s so many different genres, but you’d see the same people at a lot of the shows, because it’s about supporting Irish music.”

Some of Karla and Jack’s Irish ones-to-watch include hotgirl, Cruel Sister, Gurriers, Chalk and Enola Gay. But in terms of their own journey, SPRINTS are still coming to terms with the countless head-spinning milestones of the past 12 months.

“We signed the record deal in January 2023, but that seems like a different world now,” Jack reflects. “We went over to Berlin, where they have their main office, to do that, and that was really exciting. And when we finished recording the album, that was another moment of, ‘Fuck – we did it. We actually have an album.’”

“Even walking out at a festival in somewhere like Derbyshire, a place you’ve never been, and the tent is absolutely rammed with thousands of people,” Karla adds. “You’re like, ‘Jesus. These people are here to see you, and they know your music.’ Those moments are big.”

Letter To Self is out now on City Slang. SPRINTS play Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick (April 18); Róisín Dubh, Galway (19); Ulster Sports Club, Belfast (20); Coughlan’s, Cork (25); Mike The Pies, Listowel (26); and Button Factory, Dublin (May 3 & 4). See their full list of international dates at sprintsmusic.com

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