By Talia Robinson
There’s an ache that bleeds through All That Is Over. Not the hushed ache of melancholy; it’s the raw, blistered wound of living in a world that takes and takes until you’re forced to either break or burn. SPRINTS have always thrived in fire, yet here on their second album the Dublin quartet transform that fire into something ceremonial. It’s a baptism by noise that insists catharsis is possible through the act of screaming, strumming, and surviving.
Our serrated overture Abandon is the sound of despondence rendered in three minutes. A solitary cymbal jitters like the twitch of an anxious pulse, whilst Karla Chubb’s vocals stagger between contained mutterings and unrestrained eruptions. Each drum hit lands like a countdown – drummer Jack Callan invoking that sense of inevitability pressing in until the album detonates beautifully – and it’s almost suffocatingly honest about the realities of being caught in cycles you cannot escape.
If Abandon is declaration, To The Bone is excavation. Chubb strips herself raw, her voice gnawing at insecurities until nothing remains but nerve endings. The bass thrums like a heartbeat running out of rhythm, while the guitars build walls of noise that feel as claustrophobic as they are cathartic. This is punk as flaying – a peeling back to marrow. Where Abandon announces, To The Bone dissects. It gnaws at itself, baring the marrow of insecurity and doubt. The rhythm section throbs like a body in panic, while the guitars coil around Chubb’s vocal in jagged spirals. There’s no glamour in this exposure – only the harsh, necessary work of laying yourself bare, nerve by nerve, bone by bone.
SPRINTS reframe philosophy as cacophony. Descartes surges with contradictions – chaos bound to precision; fury cut with reflection. Zac Stephenson’s guitar doesn’t so much play as it scalds, dripping feedback like molten wax; similarly, Need is all apt urgency. A pulse-track of desire and desperation, it careers forward without stopping to ask permission, and there is something frantic in Chubb’s delivery. She is clawing at the walls, trying to articulate the unbearable ache of wanting more than the world is willing to give.
A metronome of hunger, All That Is Over simmers with humiliation and fury intertwined; a snarling admission of vulnerability weaponised into noise. Every note feels spat; every riff jagged. Perhaps the album’s molten core, Rage, is most prevalent of this motif. It is not simply anger. This track is anger honed and sharpened to tangible precision. Amongst the siren-like serenity of the guitars shrieking and the tribal tonality of the drum march, there is structure in the chaos; a track that leaves you spent yet craving another hit, and we’re threatened by that promise in Something’s Gonna Happen. Sam McCann’s bass buzzes with unease – the tempo teetering with every note straining toward inevitability – and when it finally breaks, it’s arguably the band at their most apocalyptic. It’s devastating.
A deceptive title, Better does not soothe; it interrogates the very notion of improvement. Their sound swells then recedes, surging forward only to collapse under its own weight. SPRINTS are imploring you to consider what “better” even means if the scars are permanent, for it’s a track caught in limbo yet they’re all the more human for it.
That notion is most imperative within the closing companion tracks. Coming Alive, a bruised and bloodied euphoria of a song, and the fever dream of distortion that is Desire – together they are the folie à deux of syncopation. It’s the sound of someone laughing through tears, and in an album that feels more like a ritual in noise than just a track listing, SPRINTS prove they are not just a punk band. Dublin’s finest have always carried themselves with an urgency that becomes a necessity, wrestling with the brutality of living and the possibility of release. It’s punk not just as sound, yet as sacrament.
Where their debut showed promise, this sophomore delivers profundity. All That Is Over is an album that scorches the throat, rattles the chest, and leaves your ears ringing long after the music subsides. Noise has rarely felt so necessary, and SPRINTS make it sound like salvation.
All That Is Over is out now everywhere.
Abigail Mableson 
Jack Walsh