Riding a wave of pure positivity after the release of debut album Letter To Self, we catch up with vocalist Karla Chubb to find out how they got here – from channelling her inner David Byrne to finding comfort and purpose in exorcising her demons…
“Music has been that anchor for all of us, a way to connect with the world, and it’s something always that’s been in my life. When people ask, ‘When did you first pick up a guitar?’ I don’t remember not wanting to play guitar, it feels like this omnipresent thing.”
Karla Chubb is giving us a brief history of her life in music thus far, something she’s no doubt been asked to do countless times since January, following the release of her band Sprints’ sensational Letter To Self LP – one of the best debut records of the year.
Growing up, Karla didn’t have many musician friends, but as a huge fan of Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell, she leaned into folky, singer-songwriter territory. It wasn’t until she met guitarist Colm O’Reilly and drummer Jack Callan things changed, however, and Karla found herself drawn to heavier sounds like Zeppelin, Pixies and Fugazi. The trio started making music together with a rotating cast of bassists, but when Sam McCann joined the line-up finally clicked.
“He had that beefy bass and we were messing around with Queens Of The Stone Age-style riffs and Savages drumbeats and it really just connected,” Karla remembers of their first jam session in Jack’s parents’ house. “We felt the chemistry immediately and that’s the one thing that spurred us on: the natural, unspoken understanding of what we want to make and where we want to go. We just started jamming and writing, and it snowballed very quickly from there.”
Building on those 'beefy' foundations and bonding over bands like Talking Heads and Nirvana, Sprints found themselves strolling down a punkier avenue, which Karla owes to her discovery of the early PJ Harvey albums – Dry, in particular – and the Portland band Wipers. The influence of Dublin post-punks Gilla Band (the drummer of which, Dan Fox, produced Letter To Self) also weighs heavily on Sprints' sound, as well as the “gothic darkness” of Bauhaus. Veering from sombre to severe in the blink of an eye, Karla had to find a vocal delivery to match. Admitting she “stole a bit from David Byrne”, there’s also an intensity to match the likes of Witch Fever or Amyl And The Sniffers, and a poetic flow reminiscent of fellow Dubliners Fontaines DC.
All of this energy has culminated in Letter To Self, a staggering debut record, that has seen them lauded by the likes of 6 Music and receive rave reviews across the board. With a sold-out headliner at London’s Heaven booked for next month, they’ve already added a show for the much bigger O2 Forum Kentish Town in November. It’s a lot to take in.
“I think we were a little taken aback,” Karla gushes, of their seemingly overnight success. “It’s incredibly rewarding and fulfilling to see [the record] accepted so well because it was a very personal album to make – very emotional, and sometimes that not everyone’s cup of tea – but when we saw monthly listeners go up and fans responding to it, it gives you confidence in yourself.
“Everything is a lovely surprise," she continues. "We’ve had people that we’re massive fans of, like Faye from Savages reach out and say, ‘I’ve heard that you guys are inspired by me, I love the album and I think you’re amazing.’ When I saw that message on my Instagram I got the shakes and had to show my girlfriend. It probably feels like we came out of nowhere, and we feel very lucky – we couldn’t have dreamed it better.”
Indeed, it may feel like Sprints burst onto the scene with no prior warning, but they’ve been at it for five years, dropping two EPs – 2021’s Manifesto and 2022’s A Modern Job – and slogging it on tour with the likes of Yorkshire post-punks Yard Act and Britpop faves Suede. Despite these milestones, however, Karla explains that they weren’t championed by the Irish music press early on, as they hadn’t ‘earned’ it.
“You’re not really accepted at home until you’ve made it abroad,” she sighs. “We wouldn’t get that much radio play or coverage or retail space, but when you hit a certain level in the UK, people are like, ‘Oh wait, they’re on 6 Music all the time and they’re selling out shows in the UK? Shit, maybe we should pay attention to these guys from Dublin since we’re a Dublin publication.’
“That’s what a lot of Irish bands have experienced – a sense of having to make it in America before you can make it at home. A lot of people don’t think you’re even a band until you’ve put an album out, which is fair enough, and this is our first statement and first full body of work that we’ve been able to release.”
As their first full-length, Letter To Self is – as the name suggests – a “very internal reflection” for Karla. Where the debut EP was more political, and the second was “about my existential crisis with modern existence”, on the album proper she’s ruminating on her reactions to society’s expectations and demands in 2024.
“With the album it was, ‘Why does stuff like that bother me? Why do I have to panic about getting a wife, a house, a job… Why does that irk my so much? Why do I struggle to communicate or do these things?’
“Some of [the songs] are stories that I felt I needed to tell or get off my chest to shed the weight and move past them. I think anyone that suffers with anxiety or depression will understand that as much as it’s difficult to talk about it, when you do talk about it you open this door to try and process it. I think a lot of it was internal, like, accepting my sexuality, or accepting myself and my flaws.”
Letter To Self runs the emotional gamut of reckoning with your own thoughts, feelings and identity in all their confounding ways – from the opening double-header of Ticking and Heavy dealing with anxiety spirals, Adore Adore Adore pointing its crosshairs at misogyny in music, and Literary Mind exploring those joyous feelings of falling in love.
Not all of this was premeditated, as Karla admits she didn’t have a hitlist of topics in mind when writing the album, it just kind of happened. Having read that IDLES’ Joe Talbot doesn’t write a single lyric before going into the studio, he just freestyles it, it influenced the Sprints vocalist to be looser in her own approach.
“I never sat down like, ‘I want to write a song about what just happened in Dublin,’ or, ‘I want to write a song about being gay,’ I just let that come out when I’m playing,” she begins. “When I’m playing around with melody or chords, I just stick the mic on to do a freestyle vocal take – sometimes it’s jibberish, sometimes it’s words, sometimes it’s lyrics. It’s completely trusting my gut in what the music has told me I want to say and I can lean into that.
"Before I even knew I wanted to explore these things about myself, my own head was forcing it out a little bit. It makes me sound a little pious, but I was fully falling into whatever the sounds, textures, guitars or whatever noise we’re playing around with inspire. That's how Cathedral came out – full rage felt really natural to go along with the guitar riff, and it very naturally fell out of my brain (laughs).”
Cathedral confronts the realities of growing up queer in a Catholic Ireland and the struggles of accepting who you are. Writing about the track previously, the band said, ‘With the rise of vile anti-trans vitriol being spewed across social media and Irish media at the moment, this song is an on the nose defiant cry against them… It’s a cry of support to those of us trying to stand up for the people they consider ‘other.’’
Have Sprints had any feedback from fans feeling heard and seen?
“The first time we really experienced it was in the summer playing festivals across the UK basically every weekend, places like Standon Calling where people can bring kids and stuff, or the in-store tours that were all-ages and people brought their teenagers – that was amazing to get to talk to people,” Karla smiles.
“You’d get parents coming up like, ‘My daughter’s trans,’ or, ‘My son’s getting bullied at school because he doesn’t look like everyone else or act like everyone else’, and that’s quite touching. We’ve had adults come up and talk about how they’ve related to the lyrics and topics. That’s the greatest honour you can have as a musician, to have people relate to it because for all of us, music is that as well. We all turn to music to understand and connect with the world and feel that human connection.”
But for all the empowerment and rage the courses through Letter To Self, there is a palpable sense of darkness. Something lurking inside. Explaining that she and Jack are “massive horror buffs”, and fans of filmmaker Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) in particular, they love the pull and release of “anxiety-inducing” music, creating a powerful sense of dread to juxtapose the righteous fury.
There’s more to the shadows that the sounds that create them, however, and Karla’s experiences – and raw descriptions of them – play a crucial role in grounding Letter To Self in reality, and the ways we can succumb to the blackness. Not least through the incredible single Shadow Of A Doubt.
“There was a lot of fear with releasing Shadow Of A Doubt; this is a very real song about a very dark thing, that I’m going to have to talk about if I release it, and it hit me quite hard,” she remembers. “Obviously you have family and people who inspire the songs, and if they hear it are they going to know that? Am I going to have to deal with that situation? And how do you protect yourself in that? There is some self-preservation in that, so I can’t go out and rip those wounds fully open, but I’ve done it as much as I feel comfortable.”
A change of pace to the majority of the record in more ways than one, the Shadow Of A Doubt vocals were recorded in just three takes for the purest, most emotive performance possible, as Karla explores her battles with depression and the resulting isolation that can lead to suicidal thoughts.
“It’s about feeling trapped and crying for help, and people not seeing it or understanding it,” says Karla. “I went through a really dark time in my 20s and I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t want to live this life; I couldn’t grasp the idea that we’d all have to wake up, work, go home, and that’s the extent of the human existence and I can’t do anything about it – all I get is 20 days of annual leave a year, working a job I don’t enjoy.
"I struggled so much with my sexuality, and even admitting to myself that I wanted to be a musician because it was such a far-fetched thing to ever believe. It took me a long time to accept it. It’s a very honest account of crying for help, either literally or thinking I was and people not even noticing.”
Despite the initial fears of releasing the track, it was producer Dan that encouraged Karla to put it out into the world, explaining, ‘This song is so brutal and honest, it’s a song someone could hear and save their life.’
“If I’m going to be this honest person I can’t be a chickenshit about it,” Karla considers with a grin. “It’s about putting out music that matters and we’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted our music to matter and say something. It’s not about me any more, if it can connect with other people.”
And as the band currently trek their way across North America before a completely sold-out UK run, and slots at festivals like Bearded Theory and Live At Leeds, ahead of their biggest headline shows yet this November, there’s a lot of people to connect with. After five years of toiling away, it’s finally happening for Sprints. But where does it go next?
“We’ve all quit our 9-5,” says Karla, with a sense of pride. “I think it’s just this now: keep putting albums out and keep playing. We always wanted to be musicians and we have the opportunity to do that now, so we owe it to ourselves to give it everything we have.
“It couldn’t have gone better, the debut; we’ve made a solid statement and introduced ourselves to the world, and now we have the opportunity to keep doing that. All I want to do is make music, so I’m not going to to let it slip.”
Letter To Self is out now via City Slang. Sprints tour the UK and Ireland throughout the year – get your tickets now
Read this next:
