KNEECAP - FENIAN Review
Outrage refines into unexpected cohesion without once losing its bite.
There’s a point where a band stops being just a band and becomes a running commentary on itself. For KNEECAP, that threshold was crossed some time ago. Between courtroom headlines surrounding Mo Chara’s dismissed terrorism-related charges and the usual pre-release hysteria, FENIAN arrives already over-interpreted.
The real question is whether their sound can still hold when the noise around them gets this loud.
After their debut Fine Art, early work on a second record was shelved after the group felt it too closely echoed their debut. That dead end became a turning point, pushing them towards a reset in process and leading them into collaboration with producer Dan Carey that sticks.
Working alongside Carey, FENIAN’s production feels more controlled than their earlier work. Carey’s approach, sharpened through projects across the Windmill scene and guitar music acts like Fontaines D.C. and Geese, has long been about stabilising volatility rather than diluting it. Here, that results in a record that feels louder but more contained, with the trio’s intensity channelled into sharper form, but never suppressed.
The title doesn’t offer any neutrality. “Fenian” carries a layered history – once tied to Irish republican militancy, it was later repurposed as an oppressive sectarian slur against Irish Catholics. That dual meaning runs through the record as an unspoken pressure point, shaping its identity.
‘Éire go Deo,’ translating to “Ireland forever” opens the album on an unexpected note. Rather than immediate propulsion, it drifts in with a slow, atmospheric movement – uneasy trip-hop textures under near-ethereal vocals that recall artists like Enya, carefully establishing mood over momentum.
From there, rhythm takes on a structural role that defines how everything else lands. Language follows that logic too: English appears far more frequently than in previous projects, deployed with a directness that prioritises clarity of message. Irish is still central, but functions more as a framing device than a constant presence. “Mhúscail sibh an fathach” (“you woke the giant”) taken from ‘Smugglers & Scholars’ lands as an assertion in itself: KNEECAP mean business.
‘Carnival’ brings its own explicit political messaging with a touch of Massive Attack-esque jungle influence, folding clips of Mo Chara’s courtroom audio directly into the track itself. It is here that the outside world is most explicitly treated as raw artistic material. Even the chant that emerges, “Free Mo Chara, free free Mo Chara,” feels perfectly pre-assembled for festival chants.
‘Smugglers & Scholars’ offers a blunt, industrial-sounding reframing of Irish cultural mythology, the title itself a disruption of the moniker “land of saints and scholars”, pulled into something colder and more culturally relevant. That shift is sharpened in lines like “Ya think it’s all poetry and clovers // When it’s raincoats and police Land Rovers”, which land with a poignant flourish. The band’s humour is still present, but it feels more urgent, delivered with more intent than ever before.
‘Big Bad Mo’ pushes provocation into more explicit territory. “As soon as you’re outraged we’ve won” becomes a kind of thesis statement for how the record engages its audience. On ‘An Ra’, that approach sharpens further. It opens with an interpolation of ‘Rule Britannia’ before moving through blunt cultural shorthand, like “Fish and chips, TV license / UKIP, mental health crisis,” that fuses satire and critique into the same surface. Its confrontations with figures like disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jimmy Saville only heighten that directness, but delivered with enough wit to avoid veering into cheap shock value.
‘Cocaine Hill’ briefly disrupts the density. Radie Peat’s (of Lankum) presence introduces a different tonal register entirely, her voice cutting through the compressed palette and momentarily lowering the record’s pressure without shifting its direction.
‘Palestine’ is the record’s most carefully handled political moment. Featuring Ramallah-based rapper Fawzi gives the track a necessary grounding that prevents it from feeling performative or tokenistic. The result is one of the few moments on FENIAN that steps outside KNEECAP’s own positioning, whilst still drawing parallels between the Irish and Palestinian perspectives of occupation.
In the current political climate, with cultural references to Gaza often flattened into mere discourse, that distinction feels important.
By the final stretch, FENIAN has already changed state. What began as outward confrontation has turned inward into a softer sense of containment. The brilliantly named final track, ‘Irish Goodbye,’ featuring Kae Tempest, completes that shift almost entirely. The phrase itself, meaning leaving without saying goodbye, is deceptively casual. The track is shaped by grief following the death of Móglaí Bap’s mother, and it shows.
Featured artist Kae Tempest arrives in an unadorned register that feels pensive and reflective, whilst beneath it a lyrical reference to ‘The Parting Glass’ grounds the track in Irish tradition. “When life gave you lemons // You squeezed them into your open wounds” is a particularly powerful lyric. The track is rooted in what Móglaí Bap describes as the “mundane things” and daily routines you miss when grieving someone, showing a more vulnerable and heartfelt side to KNEECAP that a first-time listener may not expect.
Altogether, FENIAN maintains cohesion under constant pressure. It begins tightly bound, opens into controlled volatility, and ends somewhere quieter and more vulnerable whilst remaining a solid body of work from start to finish. Make no mistake, KNEECAP are still doing what they do best: highly confrontational, thoroughly interested in provocation as a key method. They just finally sound like they know exactly where it lands.