In the backstreets of Dublin – where the glow of pub lights mixes with the scuff of footsteps and indie postcards dissolve in the rain – you find the origins of Sprints. Formed in 2019, the Irish band broke through with Letter To Self in January 2024, a record produced by Daniel Fox (Gilla Band) that throbbed with anxiety and raw energy, yet still found space for moments of melodic clarity. It was a debut that made people stop and listen.
All That Is Over, released in September 2025 on City Slang / Sub Pop, is no simple echo of that debut. It’s a statement, an attempt to turn chaos into shape. It also arrives after a turning point: the departure of founding guitarist Colm O’Reilly in 2024, and the arrival of Zac Stephenson to fill that gap. That shift left its mark, tempering the new songs with both bruises and a new kind of confidence.
This second record is a collage of controlled rage and messy introspection. Tracks like Need and Pieces throw punches in the urgent post-punk register, while Descartes rattles with philosophical musings on vanity and art (“I speak, therefore I understand”) – Chubb in full intellectual snarl. Elsewhere, Better leans into shoegaze haze, opening up a space to breathe, and closer Desire takes us on a six-minute journey from desert-rock twang to total noise assault.
And yet, something of the wild spark from Letter To Self gets lost in translation. The “big” moments here sometimes feel too carefully sculpted. Songs like Need and Descartes sound more like blueprints than eruptions, as if the band are intent on proving their scale rather than letting the fire run loose. The ambition is admirable, but a little of the instinctive punch gets blunted.
That tension – between ferocity and form, between instinct and ambition – is the record’s defining trait. All That Is Over is a document of a band trying to grow without abandoning the flame that lit them in the first place.
The result is uneven but worthwhile: less about perfection, more about metamorphosis. And like any good diary of change, it leaves you curious to see where the next chapter goes.