The Irish trio Kneecap rose from the ashes of lawsuits, social anger and international boycotts in 2025. It was conceivable that the three would have retreated to the studio with their tails between their legs to make a record that would not offend anyone. But Kneecap is too Irish and too stubborn for that. There’s too much at stake for them to keep quiet about it.
The new album is called Fenianthe word for both the mythical Irish freedom fighter, Fianna, and contemporary rebels. It is also used as a slur by pro-British against republican Irish. The rappers Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí now embrace it as a nickname. And so we return to the origins of Kneecap: once three teenagers committed to preserving the Irish language and culture, as instilled in them by their Irish-speaking parents. They met at an Irish language festival organized by Móglaí Bap.
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On Fenian they bombard us in three languages with songs full of opinions and political ideas, and with equal doses of anger and self-mockery. That takes the sting out of it. There is no clumsy oration or rambling here, the lyrics are full of sparkling discoveries.
In their own words, they spent the time left when their American tour was canceled (due to the anti-Israel comment at Coachella in 2025 and because Mo Chara allegedly waved a Hezbollah flag during a show) on this album. They wanted to show that Kneecap is more than three drug apologists – which they are – or a bunch of Gaza activists – which they are. The three gentlemen are now in their thirties, they wanted to move forward musically and in terms of content.
And so Kneecap coins their own genre on this third album: a blend of house and hip-hop, with a touch of experiment: rough edges along the synthesizers, ghostly reverberation around the kettle drum. And the great thing is: it became a flowy chain of dancing pleasure and jumping spirit, almost non-stop.
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They orate in often incomprehensible English, Arabic and a lot of Irish. But in the meantime it is clear enough what ‘Palestine’, with its ‘black skies’, is about. We travel from parties to paranoid fears, from ragged house, to busy hip hop, and reggae rhythms at the tail end of ‘Cocaine Hill’. The album closes with a deceptively light-hearted ‘Irish Goodbye’, Móglaí Bap’s farewell to his mother who took her own life in 2020.
When Mo Chara had to appear last fall for holding up a Hezbollah flag during a concert, hundreds of fans chanted ‘Free Mo Chara’ in front of the courtroom. In ‘Carnival’ those voices are incorporated, while Mo Chara raps: “I’m not the first Irishman in this room who was on trial on trumped up lies n charges/ This started at Coachella, don’t speak about Palestine, fella.”
The case was dropped due to a procedural error, March 11 this yearwhen the album was already finished. The uncertainty that, according to him, tormented him all this time, became the fuse in an inspired powder keg.
Hester Carvalho
Petkova proves why you should have the original version of Rachmaninov’s ‘Fourth’
Pianist Marietta Petkova was born along the Danube in the Bulgarian city of Ruse, as was writer and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti. Does this matter? Maybe not. It is striking that Canetti in his magnum opus Mass and Power dedicates a chapter to “the glory of the human hand,” with whose delicate fingers we “have created the world in which we choose to live.” He later added to the book an extensive argument about the conductor as the ultimate embodiment of power.
In Ruse there is still a beautiful bust by Canetti with the owl of wisdom as a companion on the shoulder, his hands and graceful fingers clearly visible. As a boy, his father dreamed of a career as a violinist, but became a merchant, and his mother was a gifted pianist. So in both of their childhoods in Ruse – Canetti’s and Petkova’s – the sound of the piano played a major role.
Petkova is a special musician, because she averses fiddling around in studios and endlessly cutting and pasting perfecting recordings. The “Concert Documents” on her own label Bloomline are all live recordings of recitals and concerts. In Petkova’s eyes, music derives its magic and power from the interaction between musician and audience. On her new album this applies to Sergei Rachmaninov’s original version Fourth Piano concertorecorded twenty years ago in Groningen with the North Netherlands Orchestra and conductor Jacques Mercier.
Rachmaninov worked – intermittently – for more than a quarter of a century on his last piano concerto. He made the first sketches after Tsarist Russia entered the First World War (1914) and the final form remarkably dates from the year that his now communist mother country became involved in the Second World War (1941).
In between were years of exile and homesickness for Rachmaninov, a despair that is cemented in the original score (1926), but which was not understood in his new homeland, the United States. And so the composer revised the work and deleted almost two hundred of the thousand bars.
Petkova, on the other hand, opts for the first and emotionally raw variant with all the “symptoms of melancholy” as Canetti characterizes the “blood guilt” of man. The intensity of Rachmaninov’s story and Petkova’s playing flow in the original version of it Fourth Piano concerto perfectly together, and his dark detachment will be better understood by Americans in Trump times. For here a man cries for the demise of the world. Even when a melody appears briefly in the final movement, Rachmaninov expert Elger Niels writes in the CD book, “the headstock contains the Gregorian Dies Irae hidden,” music of the day of judgment.
Petkova made a passionate and moving rendition of it twenty years ago. She shows how much this original version tells us modern people about the period in which we now live, in which we have actually always lived. In this sense, the pianist follows in the footsteps of her fellow citizen Elias Canetti whose Mass and Power is also disconnected from time.
Joost Galema
Pop/country
Kacey Musgraves
Middle of Nowhere
Kacey Musgraves is getting better at being alone. „I ain’t even mad at all the people in love“, she sings on ‘Loneliest Girl’, one of the prize songs on her seventh album. However, the addition of a melancholic-sounding pedal steel guitar makes it clear that the American country pop singer is also sad. After a poppy separation album and a folky reconstruction album, Musgraves returns to Middle of Nowhere back to the country sound with which she broke through. That works out well: the album is full of subtly layered songs and biting lyrics about bad men that Musgraves, against his better judgement, hopes will still change.
Country star Miranda Lambert appears on the song ‘Horses and Divorces’ to bury a hatchet in a humorous way. The two were at odds for a while, but discover that they have more in common than they thought. Both from Texas, both divorced, both crazy about horses and the music of Willie Nelson. „What asshole doesn’t like Willie?”, they sing together. On the next song Nelson sings along and the circle is complete.
Thijs Schrik
Jazz
Immanuel Wilkins Quartet
Live at The Village Vanguard Vol 1 & 2
The Village Vanguard has a mythical status in jazz. The New York basement club is small, with barely any distance between audience and band, and – a wonderful jazz cliché – illustrious jazz history in the walls. The impressive three-part recording by saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins (28) from Philadelphia can now be added to the list of famous live albums (including Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans or Brad Mehldau). His quartet (pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Ryoma Takenaga and drummer Kweku Sumbry) played there for two evenings a year ago. And you wanted to be here.
For Wilkins, who has risen to the top in recent years, virtuosity is not an end in itself, but a means to dig deeper. This is deep jazz cooking: expression and depth, with spiritual motifs, beautiful piano playing and shifting, sometimes downright hypnotic rhythm. The teamwork is close and sensitive, with a leader who provides direction without dominating. With these recordings, Wilkins cleverly confirms his position at the forefront of modern American jazz.
Amanda Kuyper
