Dublin band Sprints talk break ups, break downs, and fiery new album 'All That Is Over' • Interview • DIY Magazine

They say the only constant is change, and Sprints know that better than most. From the outside, it might have looked like their whirlwind recent years were the stuff that dreams are made of: sold-out headline tours; support slots with Fontaines DC, Pixies, and IDLES; a critically acclaimed debut LP that broke both the Irish and UK Top 20, and saw them co-signed to Sub Pop for their second. And, in many ways, they were. But every dream comes at a price, and beneath the surface, the bonds tying the band to their former selves were becoming increasingly strained.

“I think the longest [period of time] we were at home last year in one go was two weeks,” half-laughs drummer Jack Callan, reflecting on their relentless 2024. “We always say we’re in the eye of the storm,” nods frontwoman Karla Chubb. “It’s incredibly hard to know what the fuck is going on when you’re doing it. I used to be a big planner - I wanted to know what was going on for my month ahead; right now, I operate on a need-to-know, day by day basis. It’s very much one foot in front of the other.”

The irony being, of course, that even now, those feet aren’t on home turf. Between a packed festival season, a concurrent album campaign, and a couple of cross-Irish Sea moves for good measure - Jack and bassist / vocalist Sam McCann having relocated from Dublin to London - Sprints are a difficult bunch to pin down. They’re also a band who thrive in a live setting. That’s why DIY have found themselves in Amsterdam this afternoon, chatting to Karla and Jack over a round of drinks (lunchtime white wine and sparkling water - très European) before the pair hop on the Eurostar to Brussels this evening.

Jet set? Sort of. Theirs is the reality of modern day rock stars, forever on a knife edge between the emphatically ordinary and the utterly surreal. In one breath, Karla’s talking us through her current read - one of four books she bought at the airport before their flight here, because they were on two-for-one. In the next, she’s recalling how they went on a night out in Berlin with Fontaines and Greta Thunberg. “Jack was putting music on and Greta said ‘Oh, I love this song’,” she laughs, adopting a Swedish lilt. “I was thinking ‘fuck yeah!’,” adds Jack, punching the air with a grin. “‘This is wild!’”

“A lot of this album is about confidence. I think the shackles of self-doubt and imposter syndrome are gone.”

— Karla Chubb

An ever-present touch of chaos, it seems, is the cornerstone of Sprints’ modus operandi. Not necessarily intentionally so, but still; by circumstance more than design, the band have become true riders on the storm. Last year, Karla split up with her partner of eight years, moved out of their long-term home, and left behind close friendship groups: “essentially, I completely upended my life”. Just a few weeks later, founding member Colm O’Reilly quit - a departure spurred by “a desire to retreat from public performance and full time touring” which, while amicable, nevertheless left the others with a significant guitarist-shaped hole to plug.

“It was incredibly difficult,” affirms Karla, contemplating those murky couple of months. “I thought: ‘How the fuck are you going to come out of this?’ At one point, I really didn’t know if we could.”

If their ferocious debut ‘Letter To Self’ was born of private turmoil, each track a blistering exorcism of inner demons, then its imminent follow-up ‘All That Is Over’ is the inverse - the potent product of interpersonal upheaval, played out against a backdrop of a world at war with itself. In Karla’s words: “the only thing we could control was music”. The breakup itself happened in the middle of Sprints’ US tour, as she stared down the barrel of another four weeks on the road. The band had a show to play that very night. And, while Jack notes that “if someone can’t do something, we will pull the plug”, looking back now, she says having that distraction may well have been her saving grace.

“Your life is so chaotic but also so regimented at the same time. You kind of have to put your big girl pants on and go ‘Well, the choice is either I fly home and deal with this, and it has consequences for multiple people’s lives, or I just fucking suck it up and push myself through it’. I think that’s honestly how I processed it so quickly - because I had to. I didn’t have a choice.”

With all that in mind, you’d be forgiven for expecting ‘All That Is Over’ to be an album of endings - of loss, closed doors, and goodbyes. Instead, it’s struck through with a vivid sense of strength; second time around, Sprints are defiant, not defeatist, and more sure of themselves than ever.

Taking cues from the emotional whiplash of their current reality (“we’re on tour doing the thing that we love, looking at the apocalyptic outside world,” summarises Jack), they worked once again with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox to craft textured, suitably nuanced arrangements. Layered between furious noise rock (‘Descartes’) and My Bloody Valentine builds (‘Better’) are spacious electronic flourishes (‘Beg’) and the Western twang of a nylon-string guitar (‘Rage’) - the makings of a soundscape that evokes the dystopia of the album’s unavoidable global context - genocide, far-right rallies, climate crises - with arresting discernment.

“We wanted to touch on those themes more in the atmospherics of the album, to give you that sense of the tumbleweed in the desert or sitting alone in the dark,” Karla notes. “Particularly ‘Abandon’ - that’s purposely so sparse, because it’s supposed to feel like you’re absolutely walking alone into the depths of hell.”

Tempering the despair, though, are also flashes of dazzling light - moments of propulsive emotion which, while not necessarily happy, are as vital and urgent as they come. Take ‘Pieces’, a thundering account of the emotional ricochet from heartbreak to new love; or closer ‘Desire’, whose creeping cowboy prowl epitomises “how exciting it was to fall in love again, and to explore sexuality and romance”.

“Rebirth is a theme across some of [the tracks], and finding yourself again,” Karla confirms. “This year I’ve gone through a lot of growth, and feel much more comfortable in myself, my sexuality, and my gender expression.” She considers: “We had Colm leave, we transitioned into being full time musicians, and our lives personally changed; we were shedding a lot of old skin and building this whole new life.”

“We all said: ‘we can’t stop’. It wasn’t ‘what are we going to do?’; it was ‘how do we continue?’ ”

— Karla Chubb

Where Colm’s departure could have easily created room for doubt to creep in, it instead only re-affirmed Karla, Jack, and Sam’s commitment to the cause. “The three of us went for a pint, and that was a really good bonding moment for us,” she shares. “We all said: ‘We can’t stop’. It wasn’t ‘what are we going to do?’; it was ‘how do we continue?’” With new guitarist Zac Stephenson onboard from last summer onwards (“literally the first weekend we were away together, it was like we’d all been best mates for years,” smiles Jack), the recast quartet were once again able to look forwards - and this time, with fresh eyes.

“[Zac’s] excitement to be involved kind of gave us a new lease of life,” Jack says. “Because what we’re doing is amazing, and we’re so lucky to be doing it.” For Karla, entering a new relationship was also pivotal in shifting her perspective. “For the first time, I’m dating someone who has absolutely nothing to do with music. And when I mean nothing, I mean the girl told me her favourite artist when I met her was Ed Sheeran,” she laughs. “That was nearly enough for me to go ‘Well, we’re never speaking again…’. But she’s a baker - she’s so removed from the music world that [she has] this childlike innocence that you start looking at our job with. When she came to festivals, she was saying ‘Oh my god, this is backstage - Amy Taylor’s over there!’”

Karla grins. “She didn’t know who Amy Taylor was until I told her, but still. It really makes you take stock of how fucking fortunate we are to do this; coming from Ireland, there are very few people who get to break out of Dublin, even, and here we are doing our second album with City Slang but also Sub Pop. I dreamed of this when I was a kid.”

Bolstered by new blood both professionally and personally (and having developed necessarily thick skins), the whole band - but particularly Karla - now find that previously painful barbs no longer cut quite as deep. ‘Need’, for example, is a tongue-in-cheek retort to unsolicited opinions, its air-raid siren intro and bratty chanting an aural middle finger to the comments picking apart her appearance, musicianship, or singing style. “‘She’s just talking; it’s just a noisy lecture’,” she mimics, rolling her eyes.

Shrugging, she continues. “Before, some comments may have crippled me for a couple of days, and now I just kind of laugh. It’s something I’ve worked on, but I think it’s easier to brush it off a little bit now. [Because] if you’re a woman, you’ll be criticised for quite literally anything: if I’m loud, if I’m not loud enough; if I’m outspoken, if I’m not outspoken enough. There’s no winning. If they’re going to criticise you anyway, you might as well just be authentic and give them something fun to talk about.”

Musically, too, there’s a real freedom at play here. These garage punks now count sample pads and synths among their arsenal, and Karla no longer feels the gendered pressure to constantly justify her abilities. “There’s definitely a maturity, and a [sense of] stepping into our own in this,” she agrees. “A lot of this album is about confidence: I think the shackles of self-doubt and imposter syndrome are gone.”

When people talk about the ‘difficult second album’, rarely do they mean it quite as literally as this. But, with ‘All That Is Over’, Sprints have seized opportunity from adversity, emerging as a band for whom the adrenaline is only just kicking in. Nowhere is this more audible than on penultimate cut ‘Coming Alive’, a life-affirming, goosebump-inducing battle cry that, in its anthemic central refrain and closing synth swell, encodes the same sort of euphoric surrender as LCD’s ‘All My Friends’ or The Libertines’ ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ (or, as Karla suggests with a laugh, The Simpsons scene where Mr Burns is mistaken for a benevolent, glowing green alien - IYKYK).

“Joy is mortality,” she nods, quoting her lyrics. “That’s exactly the point. It’s all so fleeting, and it can slip through your fingers, so we might as well embrace it. And embrace all the brutal parts of art and touring: some of them are hard, yeah, but some of them are extraordinary.”

Of all the scribbled lyrics and extraneous ideas surrounding the record, Karla tells us, there’s one phrase in particular that she kept turning over in her mind: “‘I burnt my whole house down so I could build a better view’,” she ponders, glancing out over the Amstel. “That was what I thought my home was, our life before. And it’s so completely different now. All you can do is hope that it’s going to be better.”

‘All That Is Over’ is out 26th September via City Slang / Sub Pop.

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