Artists react in different ways to having the eyes of the world on them. Some are buoyed by it, driven to new heights, while others beat a retreat, heading back to more familiar ground. Since emerging in 2018 with their ferocious, irreverent take on hip-hop, Belfast/Derry trio Kneecap have never come across as the latter type. Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí relish a challenge, and the two years leading up to this record placed them in an intense glare. That period included their eponymous, Michael Fassbender-starring feature film, 2024 album Fine Art, and a high-profile court case (Mo Chara was alleged to have displayed a flag in support of a proscribed organisation at a London gig—a charge he denied—and the case was later thrown out). It’s inspired Kneecap to go even harder and make their most definitive statement yet. “A lot of bands will be able to lock themselves off from the world for two months to create an album,” Mo Chara tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “Whereas we had the opposite. We were completely in the limelight, having to go stand outside court and all these other kinds of distractions. You have your whole life to write your first album and then you have a year to write your second and people are trying to draw on experiences. There was no lack of issues or lived experiences that we had that year. So I think that helped the album that we had so much going on.” Produced by Wet Leg and Fontaines D.C. collaborator Dan Carey, FENIAN adds an expansive dynamism to the exuberant EDM-tinged sonics of their previous work without losing any of its explosiveness. At its best—on the propulsive “Big Bad Mo”, the lurching beats of the Fawzi-featuring “Palestine” or the heady euphoric bounce of the title track—the album sounds like a head-on collision between The Prodigy and Gorillaz. Grown-up and mature are two adjectives that usually belong nowhere near a Kneecap record, but amid all the hilariously cutting one-liners, the band also now belong among the finest rap lyricists currently in action. The snarling, sardonic list of things the UK have given the world in “An Ra” is particularly riotous, while “Liars Tale” and “FENIAN” wrap their raging polemic in a series of outrageously entertaining couplets. The trio’s brash, bolshy front means they’re sometimes portrayed as one-dimensional provocateurs, but tracks such as closer “Irish Goodbye”, a contemplation of grief lit up by a guest spot from Kae Tempest, shows they are much more than that. FENIAN is their flag in the ground—one that says they’re going nowhere.