Kneecap - Fine Art (Exclusive) Kneecap

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. -3CAG feat. Radie Peat -Fine Art -I bhFiacha Linne -Im Flush -Better Way To Live feat. Grian Chatten -Sick In The Head -Love Making -Drug Dealin Pagans -Harrow Road feat. JELANI BLACKMAN -Parful -Rhino Ket -Way Too Much

Kneecap is now the most talked-about group in the world, mobilising a generation in moshpits and on dancefloors, in fields and in clubs, and online and off. At the core of this, are undeniably exhilarating tunes. This is hip-hop at its most exciting – a potent and revolutionary force, smashing bans, barricades, censorship, and the occasional bottle of Buckfast.
Their BAFTA-winning feature film, Kneecap, starring Michael Fassbender, which was short-listed for an Academy Award, in tandem with their fiercely intelligent breakthrough concept album, Fine Art (2024), produced by Toddla T, catapulted them into the mainstream and is now celebrating its first anniversary, as well as its official GOLD sales status in Ireland - with a brand new Gold foiled edition of the 12-track album, which seamlessly merges Irish with English & satire with socially conscious lyrics, is fiercely intelligent, consistently hilarious and genuinely thought-provoking. Theirs is a voice which comes screaming from the too-often deprived areas of the North of Ireland, speaking in a language which is too-often ignored.
Whether they’re rolling up to Sundance in a police Land Rover, encouraging tens of thousands of young people to learn Irish, breaking box office records, storming festivals with epic main stage sets, annoying right-wing politicians the world over, or earning support and solidarity from the likes of Noel Gallagher, Annie Mac, Elton John, Amyl & the Sniffers, Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Massive Attack, on banners in football stadiums, or in graffiti on city walls around the world, Kneecap’s message and mode of unity, community, collective action and the power of raving, punk, and rap, is all underscored with a revolutionary sound, and blistering live performances that have built a global wave of fans unified in the joy of solidarity and the shared sweat that flings from fine art like no other.
This is a moment and a movement. And it’s only just begun.