Fine Art (Dinked HR01 'Heavy Rotation' Celebratory Edition)

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. 

Mo Chara “We’d been writing an album for around two years. We’d grown a lot quicker as a band than we were developing our production skills. We were getting big crowds at concerts and we knew needed to go for a bigger producer. When we got into the studio with Toddla T, we scrapped every song we had and started from complete scratch. T’s idea was to tell the story of Kneecap. So the record was conceived as the listener stepping into Kneecap’s world. That’s where the idea came to set whole thing in a pub. You walk into a pub at the start, there’s someone offering you a drink, there’s a singsong… really, it’s us taking you by the hand and leading you into our world.”

Moglaí Bap “You’re in there enjoying a pint at the start of the night then you go to the toilet and someone’s offering you cocaine, you go out and have a fag and bump into new people and all the time, the mood and the energy keeps changing…”

Mo Chara “The challenge was to show versatility across all the genres of hip hop. We wanted to do all of that whilst sounding cohesive. The pub was a really good way of tying it all together.”

Kneecap’s story began in 2017 with the release of their first single - C.E.A.R.T.A. (Irish for ‘rights’). The lyrics document a near miss with the RUC on the way to party, loaded up with enough illegal substances to warrant a stretch inside. While the track was quickly banned by Irish language radio station RTE for ‘drug referencing and cursing’, C.E.A.R.T.A. saw the band help usher Irish into the modern era thanks to some much needed creativity with the terminology.

Mo Chara “We’re Irish speakers living in an urban area, the first or second generation to be born in the city. Traditionally it’s a rural language after colonialism pushed it out west towards the sea. We wanted to bring the Irish language into the modern era by incorporating aspects of youth culture into it. There’s a different lifestyle in the city to rural areas. There were no words for drugs in the Irish language so we had to invent them. We’d recycle old words and apply them to modern things. That’s part of the world we want to create, where the Irish language is central and it’s modern.”

Moglaí Bap “The beauty of Kneecap is that we not only piss off people from the Unionist background, we also piss off people from the Irish community.. We don’t discriminate who we piss off. There’s conservative people in the Irish language community who think that the language should be sustained as an ancient language in all its beauty. They think we’re ruining the language with the words we’re using. But you start to hear young people using some of the words we use in our songs, referring to drugs or party life. That feels like we’re having a positive effect on youth culture.”

That positive effect comes into its own on Fine Art. A hip hop record in the sense that the glorious sprawl of Check Your Head was, its approach to modern music is magpie like, reflecting how an evening of music might evolve at a festival, or inside the right kind of pub. Where the band’s previous mixtape 3cag reflected life and issues in Ireland at the point of recording, Fine Art was always intended to be about the band themselves.

Side A

1. 3CAG Ft. Radie Peat

2. Fine Art

Makin Headlines (Interlude)

3. I BhFiacha Linne

Never Gets A Round (Interlude)

4. I’m Flush

State Of Ya (Interlude)

5. Better Way To Live Ft. Grian Chatten

Great Point (Interlude)

1. Sick In The Head

Side B 

1. Love Making Ft. Nino

Amhrán Na Scadán (Interlude)

2. Drug Dealin Pagans

Kneecap Chaps (Interlude)

3. Harrow Road Ft. Jelani Blackman

Annie ‘Air Hostess’ Mac (Interlude)

4. Parful

Chants (Interlude)

5. Rhino Ket

Last Orders (Interlude)

1. Way Too Much