The British government spent the best part of a year trying to make Kneecap go away. Mo Chara was charged with a terrorism-related offence for displaying a Palestinian flag at a concert, US visas were revoked, tour dates fell apart.
In the meantime, the band played Wembley Arena and became the most talked-about act on the planet. Fenian is the album they made in the middle of all of that, and the question it has to answer is whether it justifies the attention on its own terms. Mostly, yes.
Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, Kae Tempest) replaces Toddla T behind the desk and the shift is audible immediately. Where Fine Art had the energy of a Belfast house party, Fenian opens with ‘Éire go Deo’, a woozy trip-hop meditation with sampled Fermanagh vocals, closer to Mezzanine-era Massive Attack than anything Kneecap have done before.
Carey’s influence runs through the record’s best moments: the Portishead bass on ‘Carnival’, the surf guitar and gothic atmospherics of ‘Cocaine Hill’, the nocturnal dubstep undertow on ‘Occupied 6’. The production is darker and more layered than before. It doesn’t always work – ‘Liars Tale’ has the right politics and the wrong mix, the rap-rock fusion landing as grafted rather than felt – but when it does the results are among the best things Kneecap have made.
‘Palestine’, featuring Ramallah-based rapper Fawzi, is the album’s centrepiece. Fawzi performs in Arabic alongside Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap in Irish and English, and the multilingual arrangement is the lyric’s argument made in sound: solidarity as something you feel across languages before you articulate it in words. The trap-adjacent production is taut and precise.
‘Carnival’ is its equal in a different register: Kneecap re-enacting the terrorism trial as a hip-hop skit, the Portishead bass doing the dramatic heavy lifting while Mo Chara’s plea of “Níl mé ciontach” (not guilty) is delivered with the timing of a comedian who knows exactly what it sounds like.
The question of whether this is better or worse than Fine Art feels like the wrong frame. The debut had the advantage of surprise and the disadvantage of smaller ambitions. Fenian is more sophisticated and more varied, and because of that it occasionally loses the anarchic charge that made Kneecap feel like they were made without a safety net.
Some tracks in the middle feel underdeveloped, and the album runs long at 14 tracks. But I’ve listened to ‘Irish Goodbye’ – Móglaí Bap’s tribute to his late mother, Kae Tempest reading alongside him, the quietest thing here after 13 tracks of noise – four times today, and it lands differently every time. It reframes the whole album on its way out. That’s not nothing. That’s most of what you need.
