After festival season it’s easy to fall into a lull with winter gigs, the crowd starts cold and pints always seem cheaper in the sun. However, punk powerhouse SPRINTS took the Foundry stage Tuesday night, lighting an incessant spark and giving one of the best performances I’ve seen all year.
Dog Race, supporting, had a really interesting musicality, and the lead singer not only held impressively high notes but delivered them with power and strength, to blow Mariah Carey’s whistle tones right out of the park. The mixing seemed to favour bass over vocals, making it sometimes hard to make out the lyricism, but the set as a whole was a surprising but welcome opener before the main act.
Coming out to track ‘Somethings Gonna Happen’, the band built up to a dramatic release, exploding in noise over the crowd. Whilst myself and the front of the room were immediately wrapped up, it took a few tunes for the rest to catch up (Sheffield when did we get too embarrassed to jump like we wanted the floor to collapse?)
Despite a ranging tone, from anger to loneliness to messy joy, the energy on stage never stopped. Personal highlights were ‘Descartes’, ‘Rage’, ‘To the Bone’ – all tracks off their newest record All that is Over, released in September this year. ‘Heavy’, off first album Letter to Self, was a complete ride. I’d put my hair up pre-gig, so whilst I was banging my head like a madman, it was more just bloody swishing my fringe and eyelashes about. SPRINTS deserved full, crazy, metal-head hair everywhere kind of thrashing.
The band don’t hit you with this kind of madness immediately though, this is no pointless screams and endless noise. Through twanging electrics and prominent drums they lure you in, seduce you, into this false sense of magic before slapping you in the face with fatal drum clashes. As a collective it just works, every note was as well as the last, every musician enhanced another.
Frontwoman Karla Chubb threatened to enter the crowd, and did so, multiple times. She towered over like a higher power, jumped in with a megaphone and sheep-dogged a crowd of sweaty moshers into an even sweatier circle pit. She was perfection, ‘FATHER FIGURE’ shirt and all. As is natural in these things, someone got hurt in the craziness of it all, but without hesitation the set was paused and fan checked on, Karla laughing after that “Moshing may resume in an ordinary manner”.
How do you bring a show that the room doesn’t want to end to a close? An incredibly sincere message of reality to inspire hope and togetherness (well that’s how they did it anyway). Karla spoke of the turbulent times many people are facing today and how they, as artists, hope to be the ‘antidote’, pushing “community, the arts, love, and most importantly music – make noise that fucking matters!”
Classic ‘Little Fix’ closed the show, the band walking off, lights going up, unveiling sweaty foreheads and wrecked trainers. Energy is never destroyed only transferred, and whilst I know nothing about science, I know that the power off that stage turned to elation across the crowd. Its been a while since a gig has made me feel like that, exhausted but beaming, and since I’ve seen such synergy live. SPRINTS are on tour for a little while longer in this country and, for your own sanity and soul, catch them before they run off.
10/10
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