Karla Chubb of Sprints: ‘You definitely get the comments, the F-word and stuff shouted at you’

The clatter of crockery is playing havoc with Karla Chubb’s train of thought. “The guy in the background has been clanking cutlery and throwing pennies into the till. I find it incredibly hard to focus,” says the Sprints frontwoman, gritting her teeth amid the lunchtime tumult of a busy Dublin hotel. “Even when you’re speaking, I can’t not stop with that noise. It’s distracting me. I do find myself being pulled. I find it challenging and tiring.”

Chubb was recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which can affect a person’s ability to concentrate or cause them to seem restless. It has coloured many aspects of her life – and is a huge influence on the cathartic songs she writes with Sprints. “Can you hear that sound/ can you hear that silence… how it invites violence?” she sings on A Wreck (A Mess), a highlight from the Dublin punk-pop quartet’s debut album, Letter to Self.

It is just one of the many difficult subjects with which she wrestles across an extraordinary record that fizzles with shin-kicking chutzpah. She also reflects on impostor syndrome, depression and the background thrum of homophobia she experienced as a queer teenager in the middle-class Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham.

[ Karla Chubb of Sprints: ‘I was never hyper-feminine, never super-masculine or butch, but always somewhere in the middle’ ]

Sprints songs are breathless pile-drivers, powered by Chubb’s ear for cut-glass melody and by their producer Daniel Fox’s ability to make intimate music feel huge – a talent honed with his own group, Gilla Band. Yet the material is also strikingly raw and unfiltered. Listening to Letter to Self feels like tiptoeing into a stranger’s room and reading their intimate diary entries. Chubb knows how much of herself she is putting out in the world.

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“We’re massively autobiographical, confessional almost,” she says, sitting alongside Jack Callan, Sprints’ drummer. “There’s a real catharsis in a lot of the writing. It’s scary, a little bit, to be that vulnerable on paper,” she says. “But it felt like the next natural progression.”

Chubb describes Sprints’ early music as semipolitical – the title track of their Manifesto EP, from 2021, was inspired by their experiences campaigning for the Repeal the Eighth referendum. With Letter to Self, Chubb angles the mirror inwards, exploring her most profound hopes and fears.

Those older songs “are a little more surface level about difficulties we’re facing in our lives – examinations of modern living and monotony. But it was important to document my life so far – and the struggles,” she says. “There is still a lot of stigma around mental health and anxiety, particularly sexuality and struggles with gender and identity. It had to be the next step. It is a little scary how people will interpret them.”

The “flip side”, she continues, is “the beauty of people relating” to her lyrics. “As much as they are specific scenarios and events and experiences that inspired those songs, you don’t necessarily want the writing to be that on-the-nose,” she says. “You want it to be open to interpretation.”

These are heady days for Irish music, and Sprints are the latest of a generation of guitar bands raising a din at home and overseas. The NME has heralded them as Dublin’s next “no-f***-given guitar heroes”. Clash magazine praised their “electrifying live show”. They have a major supporter in the BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Steve Lamacq: last year he hosted a Sprints concert in England to mark the UK’s Independent Music Week.

Still, not all their reviews have been quite so gushing. Around the time of that Lamacq gig, the Fine Gael TD Ciarán Cannon caught Sprints on The Tommy Tiernan Show, on RTÉ One, and tweeted: “Heard better music from slightly embarrassed TY students.”

The comment was widely criticised, not least by other Irish musicians. They pointed out that, as his party’s spokesperson on media, arts and culture, Cannon ought to do better. The Mercury Prize nominees Lankum went further, tweeting to Cannon that they would “be personally handing out the bags of s*** at your next appearance”. The politician deleted the comments and apologised, but the words still stung.

“If you’re in the public space you’re open to criticism,” says Chubb. “We’re fully aware of that. I don’t think everyone is going to love our music. If you don’t like something, tweet away to your heart’s content. It’s not going to keep me awake at night. It was when we noticed he was the spokesperson for culture and arts. If you’re one of the few people in the country supposed to help foster, nurture and grow the arts – and represent all the arts, not just the arts you enjoy – you have to represent them equally. That’s the part that pissed me off. You’re supposed to be representing everyone.”

Chubb was born in Dublin but spent her early childhood in Düsseldorf, where her father was posted for his job with Enterprise Ireland. When she was six, the family moved back from Germany to Rathfarnham. She recalls feeling out of place as a queer teenager: the journey towards coming to terms with her gender identity is one of the threads running through Letter to Self and tracks such as Cathedral – “a delving into sexuality and Catholic guilt, influenced by Karla’s experiences as a queer woman suffering from internalised homophobia”, according to the album PR.

In addition to internalised homophobia, there’s plenty of the external kind around, too. Dublin has witnessed a wave of homophobic violence recently. Chubb and her partner live on Capel Street, in the heart of the capital. Would they feel safe walking around the city centre holding hands?

“I’ve been fortunate enough not to have had a physical assault. I’ve not been punched in the face holding my partner’s hand. But there’s definitely been a massive rise in attacks and assaults and abuse on LGBTQ+ people in the city. You definitely get the comments, the F-word and stuff shouted at you. We were playing a show in Glasgow and it was shouted at me out of a car, and someone was throwing eggs at us. Those experiences still happen.”

No matter how far society progresses in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, these incidents continue, she says. “It is a shame – we’ve come on in leaps and bounds in societal change. The marriage-equality referendum, the repeal referendum. That’s life – with the rise of liberal societal changes comes the rise of the antithesis of that. The rise of the right. All you can do is be outspoken about it.”

Chubb was in Paris when rioting broke out in Dublin in November. Her partner was at their flat, near the epicentre of the disturbances.

We’re going to go full in on the music and give it a bash. The financial aspect is terrifying

—  Karla Chubb

“My partner was home alone. We were very close to the looting. She was terrified. It was scary to be stuck as it was about to take off. She said, ‘Oh, I saw cars of lads pull up on the street and run out with balaclavas. They were running down Mary Street.’ She was, like, ‘Should I drive to my parents? What should I do?’ Sam from the band was calling her to check in. It was scary. It was shocking for people around the world to see. Dublin is a city we love. It’s our hometown. It’s a city full of culture and diversity. Unfortunately, it was the minority of the negative voices that were in the spotlight.”

Letter to Self is hugely anticipated. But much of the group’s support has been from the UK, where Sprints have received that daytime airplay on Radio 6 Music. It is very different in Ireland. Here they’ve been championed by late-night indie DJs, but mainstream radio has given them the cold shoulder. Is it outrageous to expect more diversity in our playlists than the likes of Dermot Kennedy, Hozier and The Script?

Ireland’s whole radio-station system is geared towards people who sing love songs, Chubb says. “That’s who we’re pumping out. They’re very successful. And they’re doing what they do very well.” But Ireland lacks the infrastructure to champion independent artists. “It’s all infrastructural,” Callan adds. “You have your Dan Hegartys, who are amazing,” he says, referring to the RTÉ 2FM presenter. But whereas the UK has 6 Music, “a whole station dedicated to that”, Ireland has just “a handful of people doing it”.

Sprints’ music is ferocious and provocative. If they have a secret weapon, it is the relentless catchiness of Chubb’s melodies. She draws influences from all over – including the noted year-zero punk nihilist Taylor Swift.

“I love pop music. She’s a good songwriter,” Chubb says. “She’s managed to break a lot of barriers. With every global superstar, it’s not all ethically the best. I love her. I’ve been a fan since I listened to her in school for the first time. When you grow up with someone putting out an album every year for 11 years, you’re bound to be a fan. It’s funny, she put out these Grammy- and award-winning albums, but when she put out Folklore and worked with Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of The National, all the music critic boys were, like, ‘Okay, maybe there’s value here, if Bon Iver likes it.’ I find that very funny, the shift in her perception. Folklore is one of my favourites. It’s funny how that shifted the second she worked with someone ‘respectable’ – oh, maybe this is a pop person worth giving credit to.”

Sprints recorded Letter to Self last March at a studio in the Loire Valley, in France. They are thrilled to be able to share it with the world at last. The release will be followed by the most extended tour of their career, including three weeks in the United States. They’ve finally decided to give up their day jobs. (Chubb works in content management; Callan is completing a PhD at Maynooth University, “researching geographies of abortion access in Ireland”.) It’s a significant but necessary leap as they look forward to bigger and better things.

“We’re going to go full in on the music and give it a bash,” says Chubb. “The financial aspect is terrifying. There isn’t a lot there to fall back on. We’re barely breaking even at the best of times. But it’s a real privilege to tour the US and the UK and Europe. You owe it to yourself to go for it.”

Letter to Self is released by City Slang. Sprints tour Ireland in April and May