Five tracks into Fenian, the listener is confronted by the sound of rapper Mo Chara expressing a desire to go and live off-grid outside a small village in County Meath. He does this in characteristic style – prefaced with the line “run along, fuck’s sake, I’m sick of you cunts” – but still, it comes as a surprise. After all, the tales of drugged-out madness on Kneecap’s previous album, 2024’s Fine Art, took place in an exclusively urban environment: at one juncture Mo Chara claimed that his preferred milieu was “the snug of a dimly-lit, shit, run-down pub”, presumably one like the lairy Belfast boozer in which much of the album was set. Nothing about Kneecap has given the impression of a band given to wistfully pining after a simple bucolic life.

And yet, who can blame him for wanting to switch off and get away from it all? The two years since Fine Art’s release have been tumultuous for the Irish rave-rap trio, and it’s difficult to discern how much their soaring profile has to do with their music. Fine Art was warmly received – it was potent, funny and original – but quickly drowned out by the din of controversy that began when Mo Chara was alleged to have displayed a Hezbollah flag on stage at a London gig in November 2024. He was later charged with terror offences, which he denied – Kneecap said they have never supported Hezbollah and “condemn all attacks on civilians, always” – and the case was ultimately thrown out of court. In the interim, there were cancelled gigs and tours, a ban from entering Canada and Hungary (decisions Kneecap strongly opposed), and calls from both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch for Kneecap’s 2025 Glastonbury set to be dropped. Badenoch had already quarrelled with them over their lurid republicanism when she was business secretary, trying to cancel a grant they’d been given – and Kneecap prevailed in that case, too.

“PR done on our behalf – as soon as you’re outraged we’ve won,” snaps fellow rapper Móglaí Bap on a track from Fenian called Big Bad Mo, but it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. Kneecap now find themselves more talked-about than listened to – far more people have an opinion about them than have ever heard their music – which is an unsettling and sometimes destructive place for an artist to be.

You get a sense from Fenian that Kneecap might be aware of this, although the most immediately striking thing about the album is its screw-you triumphalism. It makes for hugely entertaining listening, bolstered by Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap’s skilful bilingual delivery and a fantastic musical backing courtesy of the band’s beat-maker DJ Próvaí and producer Dan Carey. Carnival’s ominous, Massive Attack-y atmospherics open with a re-creation of Chara’s trial and ends with the line “history will remember you pieces of shit and you’ll never be forgiven”; Smugglers & Scholars crows “I’ll never learn my lesson, always the government’s obsession” over growling trap beats, while Liars Tale – a gripping splurge of stabbing rave synths, pounding house kick drums and a distorted bassline that quotes T Rex’s Children of the Revolution – decries Keir Starmer as “a cunt”. The track Palestine, meanwhile, conflates west Belfast with the West Bank, stirs in a guest appearance from Ramallah-based rapper Fawzi and concludes “we won’t stop until everyone is free”.

But lurking beneath the headline-grabbing stuff – largely crowded together at the start – there’s another side to Fenian. As it progresses, a different mood takes hold: less swagger, more disquiet. Big Bad Mo’s braggadocio is set to fidgety, chattering acid house that noticeably changes in tone: as the track progresses, it becomes darker and less celebratory, more anxious and intense. In fact, the hedonistic good times of Fine Art are impossible to find here. The protagonist of the drum’n’bass-fuelled Headcase is certainly wasted, but has “no plan … can’t cope”. Cold at the Top returns Mo Chara to his favourite local in partying mood, but beset by paranoia and a self-loathing born out of his celebrity – “I’m so full of myself, I’m so full of shit”. Cocaine Hill, driven by mournful guitar chords and an eerie chorus sung by Lankum’s Radie Peat, is frantic, panicked and bleak.

As scabrously funny and quotable as Liars Tale or the Brit-bashing An Ra are (“very grateful for sharing your culture with us,” offers the latter, “Jimmy Savile and HP Sauce”), the best thing here is the Kae Tempest-assisted closer Irish Goodbye, a meditation on the suicide of Móglaí Bap’s mother. The music canters along, sounding oddly sunny and entirely at odds with the elegiac lyrics. It’s a skilfully done conclusion to a compelling, smart and impressive album.

What the album isn’t, at least when taken as a whole, is the defiant victory lap it’s been acclaimed as in some quarters. Fenian is more complex, intriguing and fraught than that, which makes sense. Kneecap’s current notoriety is a complex and potentially fraught business: Fenian suggests they have more than enough about them to ride it out.

This week Alexis listened to

John and Beverley Martyn – Auntie Aviator
News of Beverley Martyn’s death sent me back to 1970’s The Road to Ruin, and particularly Auntie Aviator’s glorious dusk-falling-on-a-city atmosphere and soaring – if ultimately misplaced – sense of romantic optimism.