FENIAN

The album opens not with a beat-drop but a tribute. Over an ethereal, pulsing loop, a voice repeating Éire go deo, “Ireland forever”. Móglaí Bap gathers the voices that made him: family, teachers, and the champions of the Irish language. Its heart is a sample of the late Aoife Ní Riain caught mid radio-show. Less a rap than a manifesto: the language is safe, it is centre-stage, and it is going nowhere.

The album's first proper banger: ominous, industrial hip-hop over dirty bass. The title flips Ireland's old boast, “the island of saints and scholars,” into smugglers and scholars: border hustle beside Gaelic learning. Verse 1 is openly autobiographical, Mo Chara rapping through his own terror charge, and the song widens into a map of West Belfast under surveillance: NORAID dollars, the fall of Stormont, the lark, and the culture of saying nothing.

The terror case staged as a courtroom drama and turned back on the prosecution. Mo Chara pleads not guilty; Móglaí Bap takes the stand and names the whole thing what the chorus calls it: a carnival, a circus of distractions steering the public away from what the song says actually matters, a genocide in Gaza the band keep naming. It reaches back to Gerry Conlon and the long line of Irish people fitted up under anti-terror law, and ends with a newsreader confirming the case was thrown out.

The record's solidarity centrepiece and its clearest thesis: the Irish struggle and the Palestinian struggle are one. Mo Chara summons Gaelic myth and history (Oisín, Queen Medb, Hugh O'Neill) over Belfast Lough; Fawzi, a Ramallah rapper, answers in Arabic with a savage satirical role-reversal, imposing on Europe the partitions, walls and checkpoints the colonial powers imposed on the Arab world; and Móglaí Bap closes on the counterfactual of a Gaelic Ireland that won, then plants the flag: “from the west of the city to the West Bank, we won't stop until everyone is free.”

A breather that turns into a broadside. Half the song is the lads wanting to switch off, go off-grid to the Gaeltacht, get a chowder, a swim and a pint; the other half is why they can't, a genocide streamed to your phone and a Labour government they call Tory. It ends looking Britain in the eye: the Six Counties, the artifacts, “your kingdom is at an end.”

The title track, and a pure celebration: a rave-anthem that reclaims the slur outright and spells it out as the hook. It runs on joy and in-jokes, teaching an Englishman “eight hundred years” of history over a pint, dancing with the Fianna, name-checking James Connolly and Clannad, the Salmon of Knowledge and Setanta, and closing on a long love-letter to the Donegal Gaeltacht (Gweedore, Teach Hiúdaí Beag, the late Rónán Mac Aodha Bhuí) and the line that says it all: “thank God we're Irish.” (Norwegian band Casiokids feature, the track sampling their “Fot i hose.”)

A victory lap. Over a chant of their own names, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap tot up the wins: the Belfast crowds, the BAFTA, Sundance and IFTA awards from the film, the sold-out arenas, and the oldest trick in their book, that the outrage they provoke is free PR. It runs on Belfast slang and in-jokes, back to the 3CAG days, and lands on “it's class to be where we're from.”

The album's saddest turn, and a compassionate one: a portrait of a man ground down by addiction, poverty and poor mental health, caught in a cycle he cannot break. No punchlines, just the slow decline, the pints and the cheap cider, the rotting teeth, the house he barely leaves, and the flat, devastating close: “there was hope for him.”

The record's sharpest satire, and the one most designed to be misread. The hook, “céad slán leis an RA”, sounds like a fond farewell to the RA (the IRA); the verses reveal the pun, An Ríocht Aontaithe, the United Kingdom, “my first love.” What follows is a Swiftian thank-you note to Britain that is really an itemised charge sheet: Bloody Sunday and amnesty for the Paras, Jimmy Savile, Mountbatten, Cromwell, the Famine, internment camps, arming the Saudis for the war in Yemen, sweatshop toys. Every “thank you” is an accusation.

A big night out, and the comedown waiting behind it. A homecoming to West Belfast (the Falls Road, Beechmount) that spirals into an all-night session of drink, drugs and bravado, name-dropping and notions: “top dog tonight, I'll have the fear tomorrow.” Under the swagger it is clear-eyed about the cost, the paranoia, the emptied bag, the bed you finally fall into.

A childhood in the occupied Six Counties, told without nostalgia. The hook borrows the Undertones' “Teenage Kicks” only to say growing up here “wasn't all about teenage kicks”: it was soldiers and loyalist collusion, dawn raids and bin lids, black taxis when the buses stopped, the dirty protest, and the boys who flew to Luton for work. Verse 2 lands on the human cost: “who was shot? was he known?”, “another Ma on her own.”

A mock Irish lesson, and one of the album's most joyful ideas. In the format of a language class, Kneecap teach Gaeilge shráide, the street Irish of West Belfast, each phrase glossed in the song itself: dealing and dodging the cops, flirting, chewing gum, and “I don't give a fuck.” The title puns Gaelic on “Hooked on Phonics.” Under the fun is the record's thesis again, Irish as a living working-class tongue rather than a museum piece, with the informer (sceithire) never far away.

The album's rawest, darkest track, and its most serious: a first-person account of addiction, insomnia, hereditary mental illness and suicidal thoughts, the ruin behind the swagger of “Cold At The Top.” Radie Peat of Lankum sings the haunted chorus, the old ballad of Cocaine Lil, and the verse turns, devastatingly, on Micí Mac Gabhann and his Klondike gold. Documented here with care, not sensationalised.

The closer, and the emotional heart of the record: an elegy. Móglaí Bap wrote it for his mother, Aoife Ní Riain, whose sampled radio voice opens the album on “Éire go Deo,” and who died in 2020. Verse 2 addresses her directly, her concertina still “playing, down from the heavens,” and signs off like a letter: “your son, with eternal love forever.” Kae Tempest's verse mourns another life lost to mental illness. The title, an “Irish goodbye”, is slipping away without a farewell, the one thing he says he wanted to give her. Her voice opened the record; his grief closes it.