Sprints – All That Is Over: Album Review

Live4ever 23 September, 2025

Artwork for the Sprints album All That Is Over

4 stars hq

These songs make Sprints one of the must hear Irish bands from a long line of must hear Irish bands.

Sprints singer Karla Chubb has, like many of us, stared in the abyss of modern living, considered her response carefully and decided: ‘I could not give less of a fuck’.

OK, so there’s context from which that quote has been extracted, even if it sounds such incredibly good advice.

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The background was her affirmation that the Dublin quartet had transformed themselves during 2024, their debut Letter To Self gathering them critical acclaim and in turn real momentum.

Not the first new Irish band to revitalise post punk in recent years, during it they confidently survived the sudden departure of original guitarist Colm O’ Reilly, to be replaced by Zac Stephenson and, as Chubb declares, worked on building the togetherness that most artists need to succeed on their own terms.

Those methods, by her own volition, are defined by writing and recording primarily to suit themselves.

Produced as was its predecessor by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, All That Is Over has its roots in sensory overload.

Far from being a difficult second album – if such a thing even exists now – the singer found herself in the midst instead of a creative tsunami, a process which took place just as a long-term relationship also disintegrated.

Looking outward, war, sociopathy, dysfunction and pre-apocalyptic rage were all muses.

Not ingredients for an easy listen, but what in 2025 is worth spending our precious minutes off the doomscroll for, if it isn’t just as damaged, deep and ugly as that person in the mirror?

To this point, the brooding, deeply gothic opener Abandon explores the transformation many have been through this decade, with Chubb pensively growling, “I don’t grow old / I grow unrecognisable”.

It’s to Sprints’ credit that rather than only shoot down the outcome, they skewer the reasons why.

On the squalling of Descartes, the vocation of making art for art’s sake meets the modern enmity of judgement, of the opinion-as-fact world that lacks nuance or measure and common denominates anything in the way.

The obvious trap here though is to let that anger become a primal energy by response, delivering a record fuelled by resignation and typified by Need’s breakneck sardonic comeback to the vagaries of the male gaze.

Instead, there is control and depth. The six-minute-plus closer Desire pans from shadowy moment to moment, desperation, vulnerability and lust all constantly swapping masks as the haunted spaghetti western backdrop eventually collapses in on itself.

Around another corner, Rage takes whatever rulebook there was marked ‘Sprints’ and tosses it onto the nearest open fire.

A psychedelic bump n’ grind that wouldn’t sound out of place were it sung by Patti Smith or PJ Harvey, this is groove territory, an experiment which takes them intriguingly off reservation into a world of future potential.

If that’s a bold departure, the MBV-lite of Better appears to be an easier choice, an anti-love song that feels like its true place would be located in Sprints’ ferocious sets.

All That Is Over’s peak though is in Coming Alive; a song that splits the orthodox and their vital energised post punk, it’s simultaneously a kick in the shins, a kiss on the lips and an olive branch, a reaching out to new friends and enemies alike.

Karla Chubb said she couldn’t give less of a fuck, but not about her art, about the songs which make Sprints one of the must hear Irish bands from a long line of must hear Irish bands.

All That Is Over is very much only the beginning.

Andy Peterson

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Tags:andy peterson, sprints