Fueled by Horror Films and Pints, SPRINTS Make Music to Defy Society’s Expectations

Two hours into my chat with Dublin noise punk quartet SPRINTS, my dictaphone stops recording. I don’t notice for a while, mostly because I’m enjoying the band’s company too much. We’re holed up in a solid old man pub called The Lord Edward—stained glass, carpet straight from your grandmother’s house and no music, save for lulling background chatter—situated just across the street from Christchurch Cathedral’s imposing medieval facade and a stone’s throw from Dublin Castle. Karla Chubb (vocals, guitar), Colm O’Reilly (guitar), Jack Callan (drums) and I are all drinking Guinness, while bassist Sam McCann is breaking with tradition and having a pint of Beamish. He’s just returned from Cork Jazz Fest (“I’m not as young as I thought I was,” he tells me as we wait for the others. “A heavy two days.”) and is honoring his time there by savoring the rebel county’s signature stout.

O’Reilly, Callan and McCann all attended the same school in the suburbs of Dublin’s Northside, though they were in different grades. Chubb met the lads about ten years ago, when she was dating a friend of theirs and ended up at the same parties and gigs. Soon hanging at shows and gaffs turned into jamming with O’Reilly and Callan. At that time, the band had the “same members, bar our bassist, and we just kept changing the name,” O’Reilly explains. The trio eventually poached McCann, who was playing drums in another group, and got him to take up bass. He started off playing Chubb’s old bass, a red Fender she’d bought after spending about a year in hospital. The first SPRINTS song “wasn’t us,” as O’Reilly puts it. Chubb describes it as too “classic rock,” then changes her mind about that designation; needless to say, the track has since been wiped from the Internet. “It was too quick after our other bands,” Chubb continues. However, SPRINTS found their sound once McCann bought his own bass and the band members invested in pedals. She says that then “the experimentation just never stopped and it kind of got noisy.”

As I chat with SPRINTS, their longstanding friendship is apparent in their easy slagging and chatter. I feel like I’ve crashed just another night that they’ve gone for pints. At one point I ask about their day jobs (Chubb and McCann are leaving their positions in content management and advertising, respectively, to pursue the band full time, while Callan is finishing up a PhD in the geography of abortion access), and O’Reilly enigmatically responds, “I hit stuff with hammers.” “Colm, there’s a way—no,” Chubb interjects exasperatedly, in a familiar way that speaks to their affection for one another. For the record, O’Reilly is a technician at Intel and his favorite screwdriver is a four millimeter flathead. (“He knows how to tighten a screw. Not the ones loose in his head, though,” Chubb jokes.)

Besides history, the band also share a love of horror movies—except for McCann, who Chubb describes as the “light and, like, smiley and charismatic” one. As a fellow fan of the macabre, I’m delighted to hear that Chubb and O’Reilly have also read Tender Is the Flesh by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica. It’s a dystopian novel about a future in which animal products are deemed deadly and humankind is forced into cannibalism; ultimately a critique of capitalism, the book resonates especially for Dubliners, who are facing increasing living expenses with no relief from a government hell-bent on keeping corporations and landlords happy. Callan asks to borrow the book during the interview, while McCann recalls, “I read the first chapter and I was like, ‘Ew.’”

That affinity for darkness and unflinching willingness to explore its deepest hues thoroughly inform SPRINTS’ debut album, Letter to Self, released on January 5th via City Slang Records. Chubb tells me she read contemporary horror hits Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado while they were crafting the LP, and these dark, Gothic sensibilities are apparent in the sonic landscape.

The four recorded the album over two weeks at Black Box Recording Studio in France’s Loire Valley at the behest of their producer Daniel Fox, who’s best known as the bassist for Dublin noise pioneers Gilla Band. SPRINTS still speak in awe about Black Box, which was started in 1993 by Iain Burgess and Peter Deimel and has welcomed the likes of Anna Calvi, The Kills, The Last Shadow Puppets and Josh Ritter. The desk they recorded on was shipped from Chicago and reputedly the same make and model as one that the Rolling Stones recorded several albums on. There were vintage military broadcast microphones procured in 1989 after the Berlin Wall fell (“Hopefully they’re from the Allied side, but we didn’t investigate heavily,” Chubb says with a laugh), an original Big Muff bass pedal, custom built guitars and all sorts of equipment that spurred SPRINTS’ experimentation. “There were all these amazing things we kept discovering while we were there, and I think it opened us up to exploring and being creative… There’s some guitar licks where we were stacking four amps on top of each other just to get this one particular sound, this one kind of drone in a song,” Chubb explains.

Tapping into drone-y and noisy elements were key to creating the anxious, sweat-drenched atmosphere SPRINTS wanted on Letter to Self. The band see opener “Ticking” and the following track “Heavy” as sister songs, with the former as “the start of the spiral and the panic in your chest, and ‘Heavy’ is when that panic has fully hit, when you’re in bed at six a.m. and you haven’t slept,” as Chubb puts it. The drums kicking off “Ticking” are appropriately heartbeat-like, a swirling cloud of sound growing as Chubb’s vocals grow more and more desperate. “Am I alive?” she implores over chugging guitar. “Heavy,” meanwhile, draws inspiration from gothic rockers Bauhaus. The song invokes the headrush of fear after a night out, when you arrive home just as everyone else is going to work and question what you’re even doing with your life.

“Cathedral” storms in next, buzzing with Catholic guilt and an unquenchable energy. It’s Callan and O’Reilly’s favorite track to play; Chubb says she wrote it purely because her fellow guitarist loves metal and she knew he wanted a double-time song. “I really like anxiety-ridden, at the edge of your chair terror. That just gets me going, I dunno. I might be strange but—” O’Reilly tells me, and Karla cuts across him with, “Kinky.” Lyrically, “Cathedral” is about homophobia, which Chubb has experienced firsthand as a queer woman. While none of the band members’ parents were particularly devout growing up, the Catholic mindset is pervasive in Ireland, where even public schools still boast saints’ names and teach religious curriculum. “The amount of indoctrination in normal schools here is crazy, like,” Callan says with a sigh.

The subsequent track, “Shaking Their Hands,” opens with Fox on acoustic guitar. It’s McCann’s favorite song, which Chubb sums up as “our little Radiohead moment—early Radiohead.” Chubb wrote “Shaking Their Hands” after acquiring a second hand Gretsch, which drove her to pursue a bluesier sound. “I was messing around with a simple chord then passed it off to Colm to add a bit more Jeff Buckley to it, but it was just that really simple arpeggio,” Chubb shares. “It’s mad how something that small and simple can have something unlock in you and it just falls out.” “Shaking Their Hands” documents the difficulty artists have balancing their nine-to-five life with their creative output, as well as the exhaustion that comes with trying to keep all these plates spinning at once. The lyrics also touch on the notion that in the music industry—especially in a place as small as Ireland where everyone knows everyone—you have to work with people you find unsavory because they’re in a position of influence.

“There’s a lot of people you don’t love, or you hear things about and you don’t necessarily love to work with, but because of the nature of the industry, you sort of have to shut up, shake their hand, and get on with it,” Chubb says. “I think particularly as a woman in music, you’ve seen it with people like Sinéad O’Connor, Courtney Love, saw it with the Dixie Chicks—if you stand up against someone and say something that the main people in power don’t agree with, your career can be ended.”

“Adore Adore Adore” explores another unsettling side of the industry, specifically how when an artist identifies a certain way, others expect them to act or look in a predetermined fashion. While Christof Ellinghaus of City Slang wasn’t originally into the song, he trusted the band as they honed “Adore Adore Adore” from a six minute sprawl to its current catchy run, a little under three minutes. SPRINTS speak glowingly of their Berlin-based record label (artists formerly on City Slang include Hole, Sylvan Esso and Yo La Tengo, and SPRINTS can count Broken Social Scene, Los Bitchos, Pom Pom Squad and others as their current labelmates), who gave them the creative freedom to make Letter to Self in their own image.

The emotional crux of the album arrives in the form of “Shadow of a Doubt,” all about suicidal ideation and deep, distressing loneliness. Chubb tells me that when witnesses to our trauma and pain decide to say nothing, then “the very real consequence of that is feeling incredibly alone and not having any other avenue to really think about or explore.” That resulting anger is apparently in her jagged guitar solo on the track, giving an acid edge to the vulnerable and personal nature of “Shadow of a Doubt.” As we talk about the song, and the unfortunate silence around mental illness that still dogs Ireland, Chubb says that she worries about being “too sanctimonious or precious about these things,” later elaborating: “I think that’s a struggle you always have is, like, do you write about the shit that really matters and that’s quite dark and maybe a little more difficult for people to listen to, or just go the easy route?” Callan echoes my thoughts when he assuredly responds, “It could change someone’s life hearing [“Shadow of a Doubt”]. It could have an impact on someone, which is quite powerful, like.”

After the gravity of “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Can’t Get Enough of It” is a breath of fresh air to start off the B-side. McCann briefly moved in with Chubb during COVID, and this was one of the first songs they wrote together, drunk in her spare room. They wanted to evoke a bit of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (McCann is a fan), and Chubb insists, “You can smell the leather!” Or, as McCann says, “If you robbed a bank, that would be the song you listen to on your getaway drive.” There’s an engine-like momentum to the song, crafted to pick you up out of the emotional wreckage of “Shadow of a Doubt.” Next is a rare love song, “Literary Mind,” but in true SPRINTS fashion, the song isn’t quite so straightforward. While largely about Chubb’s longtime partner, the lead songwriter also pokes fun at herself on the chorus and the masks she’s worn over the years, especially when she was in denial about her sexuality. The unintentional sister track to “Literary Mind” comes next: “A Wreck (A Mess).” Thumping drums and frenetic, sunny guitar kick in, and you can hear why the early demo for the song was dubbed “Weezer Jam.”

The album’s penultimate track, “Up and Comer,” asks that question that haunts many bands: When do you stop being the hot new group on the scene and start just being known for your sheer talent? It’s a conundrum for SPRINTS that they hope is solved by the release of their debut, which hopefully situates them as a mainstay of Ireland’s bursting music scene. Chubb’s delivery drips with sarcasm as she sing-screams, “They say she’s good for an up and comer.” Finally, we arrive at the title track, when Chubb answers her initial cry of “Am I alive?” on “Ticking” with a definite, “But I am alive.” Letter to Self the album is laden with doom, but “Letter to Self” the song is when the listener comes full circle, ultimately finding an inner peace—even if the soundtrack to that peace is anything but serene. “It takes that idea of everything people have told you is wrong and wraps it up in a nice little bow,” Chubb says. The bass solo out the end functions as a “closing credits” of sorts, in Chubb’s words, which feels appropriate for an album that seeks to evoke the same terror felt in horror films. Hopefully, following horror movie convention, this one gets a sequel.

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Go harass her on Twitter @theclaremartin.