A new album from Kneecap, at this point, is like a brick thrown through the window of the international music charts. Ever since they put up a “FUCK ISRAEL, FREE PALESTINE” banner at last year’s Coachella music festival, the politically-charged Irish rap group has been at the center of an ever-escalating hailstorm of controversy. Frontman Mo Chara (government name Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) faced terrorism charges for an incident where he allegedly waved a Hezbollah flag a fan threw at him onstage, then beat the case in court. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in between rounds of cutting people’s disability benefits, called Kneecap’s politics “completely intolerable.” The governments of Canada and Hungary have both banned the group from entering their countries, and they’ve lost their U.S. visa sponsor, making it impossible for them to tour in the States for the time being. Sharon Osbourne called for them to be banned from the stage at Glastonbury, and even the once-great punk rocker Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols has deemed them “my enemy.” This March, Kneecap came under attack yet again from U.S. Representative Maria Salazar, this time for visiting and performing in Cuba, a trip we covered in this magazine. Their music has become a focal point for the broader, world-spanning fight over colonialism and resistance, and exactly what forms of political expression are and aren’t acceptable.

In other words, rap music is dangerous again, and thank God for that. We haven’t really seen the genre provoke a political uproar on this level since the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then, self-righteous authority figures like Hillary Clinton, Dan Quayle, and the Parents Music Resource Center were waging their own (not-so-secretly racist) moral panic over rap lyrics, declaring that songs like NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” and albums like 2Pacalypse Now had “no place in our society.” Predictably, it backfired: the “parental advisory” label became the unofficial badge of Cool, and artists like Eminem and Ice Cube expertly used the outrage against them as fuel for their publicity machines, rising to global superstardom. Now, a new generation is seeing the same pattern play out, this time around a loud-mouthed trio from Belfast—and Kneecap have met the moment with Fenian, a new album calculated to enrage their detractors with songs about militant Irish nationalism, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and everything in between.

 

From its first bars, the project follows hip-hop’s longstanding law of reciprocity: you say our names, you’re getting a response. “You think we’d move on and forget what happened? / Nah, fuck Keir Starmer / Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer / Better off as compost for farmers,” spits Mo Chara on “Liar’s Tale,” an incendiary diss track against the British state. “Na Sé Chontae [the Six Counties] and the artifacts, we'll be takin’ all that,” adds his compatriot Móglaí Bap, dipping in and out of Irish with a promise to unify Ireland and loot the British Museum of its stolen treasures. After their recent legal troubles, you might expect them to play it safe, but apparently they’ve decided to do the exact opposite.

Rapping in Irish is the group’s signature move, and it’s an aggressively un-commercial one: without subtitles or the Genius app, half their lyrics are incomprehensible to most of their international audience. There’s a barrier to entry that requires listeners to do a little work, if they want to fully appreciate the music, and that’s anathema to a society obsessed with easy, frictionless consumption. Fortunately, the indigenous Irish language has a mellifluous, lilting quality that lends itself to flowing over a beat; this wouldn’t work nearly as well with, say, the staccato gutturalities of German. And politically, it’s more than a gimmick. As Kneecap are constantly reminding us, the Irish are a colonized people, and language is a battleground: whether in Ireland or Africa, the British Empire spent centuries trying to erase the native languages it found, replacing them with the Queen’s English. They wanted to occupy the mind as well as the land. Likewise, anti-colonial subversives like Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o were always trying to preserve and weaponize their native tongues, whispering words of rebellion in Gikuyu, or Irish, behind the occupier’s back. Kneecap have just turned up the volume.

One of the album’s most memorable songs, “Gael Phonics,” serves as a crash course in Irish for the uninitiated Anglophone—only the teachers are belligerent, half-drunk, and only interested in teaching you the rude words:

Fuck the Duolingo bird, he be talking some shit

Stick this on repeat and you'll be fluent in getting lit [...]

 

“Cluasaíocht” is flirting and “fulaingt” is dying a death

When you dress to impress, “tá tú gléasta go maith”

“Guma choganta” for your breath

“Capaillín”, ketamine

“Bagairt” is threatening

If ya want an extra pint, deir tú “pionta sa bhreis”

Meanwhile the title track, “Fenian,” attempts to reclaim a word that’s historically been used as a slur against Irish people—including in a high-profile case involving a British policeman in Merseyside as recently as 2024. Here, it’s turned into a defiant badge of honor, repeated in the cadence of a football hooligan’s chant: F-E, F-E, F-E, F-E-N-I-A-N! In the background, a bouncy, cartoony beat bops and boings along, making this one of the more straightforwardly fun songs on the album. But here, censorship rears its head again: according to Kneecap manager Dan Lambert, subway stations in London refused to allow posters for the album to be displayed unless the word “Fenian” was covered up.

For rap fans who grew up in the 2000s, this rings a bell. Back in 2007, legendary East Coast rapper Nas was planning to release a dark, edgy concept album dealing with slavery and race in the United States, and title it simply the N-word. Whether in good taste or not, he wanted to reclaim the slur for his art, exerting his own power over something that was created to keep people like him subjugated. But a young New York state assemblyman stepped in to stop him, threatening to pull $84 million in state pension fund investments from Universal Music unless Nas changed his title. The CD released in 2008 as “Untitled,” and the politician grew up to be Hakeem Jeffries. Today, the same kind of interference is being leveled at Kneecap, for the same reasons. Across continents and decades, censors are always looking to dictate the terms historically oppressed and colonized people can use to talk about their own oppression, and protect the dominant group from having to face the discomfort and ugliness of what it’s done.

They don’t always succeed, though. Another of Fenian’s standout tracks is called “Palestine,” and here the group has invited Palestinian rapper Fawzi to join them, laying down his verses in Arabic. Like Kneecap, Fawzi is a radical internationalist; the song that brought him to the Irish artists’ attention is a tribute to Fidel Castro. (“Any obstacle that’s in my way, I’ll smash it / Castro is my uncle, we roamed the world with just a cigarette.”) Here, he sarcastically envisions a world in which the history of colonialism in the Middle East was reversed, and it was Arab and Muslim nations who took a ruler and carved up the map of Europe:

وإفرض قسمها الآن

فرنسا عسوريا ولبنان

بجدار حوطلي باريس

حاجز بأمستردام

أنا بسلك حالي ببريطانيا

ممكن أخد شويتين من هان

ليبيا ممحنة قال بدها إيطاليا

And just imagine—let's divide it right now:

France to Syria and Lebanon;

Paris, fence it off for me with a wall;

Amsterdam, put up a checkpoint

I’ll just make do for myself over in Britain—

Maybe I’ll even grab a little something extra while I’m there.

Libya, in its distress, cries out: “I want Italy!”

Beyond the satire, the combination of cultures and influences here is something unique and valuable in itself. On this track, three pallid Irishmen have borrowed the chains, tracksuits, and beats invented by Black Americans to express their struggles, and then passed the mic to a Palestinian rapper who idolizes Cuban revolutionaries. There’s literally nothing else like that in music. Ironically, despite their fierce love of their respective homelands, these artists give us a glimpse of what art and culture might look like in a world without nations or borders at all.

So much for the politics, which are all well and good. But the key question remains—with apologies to Gayatri Spivak, can the subaltern rap? Until recently, it was somewhat of an open question. Kneecap’s first album, Fine Art, was arguably more of an interesting novelty than a true banger, laden down with tracks like “Rhino Ket” (about taking ketamine) and “I’m Flush” (about having lots of money) that sounded fairly pedestrian in the overall landscape of hip-hop. But the group made a real step forward with the release of their single “The Recap” last year: suddenly Mo Chara’s flow was more deft and complex, and the production had gone from simple, repetitive, EDM-inspired beats to more energetic trap and drum-n-bass influences. (This tends to happen when you get some money, and with it better production: in the American context, look at the difference between Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city.)

On Fenian, Kneecap have improved again. The beats, for the most part, go hard. They’ve got more emotional range now, from the goofy energy on “Fenian” to Móglái Bap’s—or rather, Naoise Ó Cairealláin’s—genuinely moving account of his grief at his mother’s suicide on “Irish Goodbye,” the album’s closing track. Neither of the two main rappers are quite elite lyricists, but what they lack in technical ability, they make up for in energy and enthusiasm, and they’ve honed their ability to write a catchy hook: in the past week, I’ve repeatedly found myself muttering “Big bad Mo agus Moglai Bap, let’s go” or “Smugglers ‘n’ scholars, gettin’ guns with American dollars” while answering emails or feeding the cat.

All this is essential, because there’s only so far you can get with music that’s politically worthy, but not fun or emotionally compelling; even Michael Jackson’s most loyal fans aren’t spinning “They Don’t Care About Us” on a regular basis. There’s still room for improvement here—the song “Headcase” feels like a retread of “Sick in the Head” from the previous album, and the braggadocious “Cold at the Top” didn’t do much for me. (Though YouTube critic and friend of the magazine Anthony Fantano says it was one of his favorites, so results may vary.) But at any rate, Kneecap seem to be headed in the right direction, both politically and musically.

If nothing else, they’re pissing off all the right people—and both despite and because of all the outrage, Fenian reached #1 in the Irish charts this month, and #2 in the U.K. charts, behind only The Essential Michael Jackson. That’s a sign of how far the once-powerful British censorship system has degraded since the days when the Sex Pistols were banned from the BBC and blocked from ever reaching #1 as a result. Apparently, people don’t like being told what’s “intolerable” for them to listen to, any more than they did in Nas and Tupac’s heyday. Especially not by politicians who cheerfully endorse bombing hospitals. Who’d have thought?