““On course towards future raucous, beer-soaked headline festival sets.” NME
“Screw-you power, relentless motorik rhythms and impressively large choruses.” The Guardian “Across six tracks that span the ups and downs of the emotional spectrum of someone digging around trying to find themselves, the Dublin gang neatly package existential panic into a buzzy, punchy musical box – DIY
Sprints today release their glorious new A Modern Job EP, produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band and out now on Nice Swan Records. Coming off the back of a sold-out and wildly raucous U.K. tour, the Dublin band now travel to SXSW to bring their own brand of forthright and direct punk to a new audience.
Revisit the video for How Does The Story Go? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flcxzuo4aig&ab_channel=SprintsMusic
Sprints have received a wealth of press support (The Guardian, Dork, DIY, NME, Loud & Quiet, Clash, Gigwise and others). They’ve also received an abundance of support at Radio 1 and BBC 6Music. Formed in 2019 when Karla, guitarist Colm O’Reilly and drummer Jack Callan – already playing together under a slowly-dwindling former guise – had the lightbulb moment at a Savages gig that they too could play the music they actually listened to and loved, Sprints have barely paused for breath since. Recruiting bassist Sam McCann, for their first show back in February of that year, the difference from day one was tangible. “Our only ethos in music is to write something that matters and that means something,” says Karla. “It’s all about expressing our identities, and injecting our personalities into it.” Often labelled a political band, even the way they inhabit that idea feels refreshing. “I don’t have to know everything to be able to tell you that something’s shit. I understand that women should have access to abortion, and I understand that mental health services are not adequate to stop people from committing suicide, so yeah, I don’t know exactly how much money is being spent on it but I don’t need to in order to tell you that it’s not enough,” Karla stresses. “It’s just a class barrier to make people feel like, if they’re not educated enough, then they can’t be involved in the conversation. But you don’t have to be Usain Bolt to run a race, and you don’t have to understand the theory of everything to understand that, morally, someone’s an asshole.”
Now, more confident in their opinions and identities than ever, new EP A Modern Job (produced once again by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox) is set to take these ideas – that the personal is innately political, and that expression and using your voice is fundamentally crucial – and solidify them even further. As Karla states, “‘Modern Job’ is just really my entire life’s crisis in one song,” and from the title track’s frustrations at the one-size-fits-all limitations of the ‘nuclear family’ outwards, Sprints’ latest is a vital, visceral next step. “Modern Job was that ‘pray away the gay’ moment in my life where I really wished that a husband, and a picket fence, and to work a job for the rest of my life was what I wanted because then life would be so much easier,” Karla reflects. “If all I wanted from life was a partner and a good car, I’d be fucking sound.
My whole life I’ve been chasing things that people told me would make me happy and it just made me incredibly depressed, and it’s only been in the last couple of years of really embracing who I am that I’ve thought, I just don’t care anymore. I’m just gonna go after what I want, and fuck it.” Sprints, then, is the sound of exactly that emotion. From ‘How Does The Story Go?’, which opens the EP with a repeated cry of “I’m not fine”, through to ‘Delia Smith’ which sonically interpolates the singer’s love of PJ Harvey and Bauhaus, to closing track ‘I’m In A Band’ with its humorous self-referencing (“And everybody asks, ‘Are you any good?’”), the ‘Modern Job’ EP is Sprints throwing their arms around themselves and embracing everything – rageful, sad, funny, excited – that comes out. “My whole life I’ve searched for a family and a place where I belong, and I have that in Sprints; sometimes I feel like my heart is going to explode with how much I love them all,” Karla smiles. “I think Sprints means a lot to all of us, and it’s really changed our lives. We’re so proud of it and we’re so unashamedly ourselves in it, it’s given us the courage to admit that music is all we want to do. Now we’re allowing ourselves to believe that it might happen, and it’s so exciting.”
Sprints – A Modern Job // 11th March 2022. Nice Swan Records