Kneecap

A slow afternoon in the warm wooden enclave that is Madden’s Bar, Belfast. A handful of middle-aged Guinness drinkers chat quietly, nestled like comfy dogs in the corner. The lights are low. The music is comforting.Until, blap! Not quite a cowboy entrance, but the door opens and the energy levels leap. In bowl three young men, familiar to the barman, the drinkers and anyone who’s interested in rap or who watches joe.co.uk or Vice videos. Kneecap, the Irish-language band smashing out of Belfast and into the world, are…

The Rutz is like any great pub in Belfast, or anywhere in Ireland for that matter: Kinda dingy, people stumbling out of the bathrooms, wiping powder off their faces, traditional Irish music playing loud on the speakers.  “It’s one of those places where you never go for one pint — you’re always stuck there for longer,” says Móglaí Bap, one-third of the Belfast rap trio Kneecap. “The pubs here are like lobster pots,” adds Mo Chara. “You can get in them, but you can’t get out.” Well, technically, you can’t…

“The Biden administration believes that the hype around the transformative potential of AI in military applications is real,” says Allen of CSIS. “The United States also has a pretty good understanding of which computer chips are going into Chinese military AI systems, and they are American, which is viewed as unacceptable.”The new export restrictions contribute to the steady decline in US-China relations in recent years, despite decades of technological codependence during which Chinese manufacturing has become the…

“We pulled the pin and got out of there.”DJ Próvai is curiously unrecognisable without his trademark green, white and orange balaclava. The pseudonymous producer of Kneecap is sitting in a Hungarian Airbnb with his fellow band members, MCs Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara, talking over Zoom. Fifteen hundred miles from home, the Belfast hip-hop provocateurs are still processing the events of the previous weekend.On 12 August, ahead of performing to 10,000 people at West Belfast community festival Féile an Phobail, the group…

It’s not even 8:30 on a Monday night, and already a good quarter of the roughly 200-person audience crammed within the converted courtyard that is Bardot’s stage for the weekly School Night concert series is bouncing around, drenched with sweat like it’s an all-night warehouse rave. “C.E.A.R.T.A.,” they all scream in unison, spelling out the Irish word for “rights” and joining in for the chorus of Irish rap trio Kneecap’s breakthrough 2017 hit of the same name. But even as their energy remains, the rest of the chorus is…