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Kneecap races for UK Number One as Melanie C and Michael Jackson close behind
Kneecap reached the midweek UK Albums Chart Number One with Fenian, ahead of Melanie C’s Sweat and Michael Jackson’s The Essential. The album, its critical reception, and Mo Chara’s dismissed legal case all complicate the group’s bid for the top.
By midweek this week the conversation around the UK album charts felt less like a numbers game and more like a cross-section of contemporary pop culture: Kneecap, the Belfast rap trio whose politics and punchlines have followed them from small rooms to national headlines, was sitting on the provisional Number One, with Melanie C and a revived Michael Jackson compilation breathing down their necks.
The record in question is Fenian, released at the start of the month. It is Kneecap’s second album after 2024’s Fine Art, and it leans on guest turns from Kae Tempest, Radie Peat and Fawzi. The sequence makes room for a dark, direct song called “Irish Goodbye,” a song that contends with depression, loss and grief without tidy resolution.
The title is intentional. The band have framed Fenian as a reclamation — a historical label tied to warriors in Irish folklore that was later weaponised as a slur — and they announced the project as a way of naming “everyone speaking truth to power.” That framing matters when the record itself folds recent events into its verses.
At the midweek checkpoint Kneecap were shown at Number One. Close behind is Melanie C’s ninth solo album Sweat, currently on course to be the best-charting record of her solo career; her 1999 debut Northern Star peaked at Number Four. If Sweat overturns Kneecap by the chart close it would mark the first time a Spice Girl solo LP has reached the top spot.
In third place is Michael Jackson’s The Essential, a catalogue collection that has found new momentum off the back of the recent biopic. The compilation previously dominated the charts for seven straight weeks after Jackson’s death in 2009; a similar surge this week would be a reminder of how film-driven catalogue resurgences can reshape the listings. Official Charts data shows fewer than 3,000 units separating third and first at the midweek cut.
The rest of the list highlights a mix of new and archival interest: Kacey Musgraves’ Middle Of Nowhere looks set to be another Top 10 entry, Tori Amos has returned with In Times Of Dragons, and the live soundtrack to Billie Eilish’s recent film, Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), is also in the frame.
Critical reaction to Fenian has been broadly favourable. NME gave the album four and a half stars and wrote: “Put all the rage-bait headlines aside and what you’re left with is a solid, progressive and fearless album from a group that could just as easily be dicking around instead of making music that matters.” It’s a neat summation of a record that sits somewhere between provocation and craftsmanship.
The album’s release is entangled with a legal episode that shadowed the band last year. One of Kneecap’s rappers, Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh), was charged after footage surfaced of him allegedly lifting a flag linked to a proscribed organisation and chanting “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” during a London show in 2024.
The group has consistently denied endorsing either organisation and described the footage as taken out of context, calling the legal attention a “carnival of distraction.” Chara has said he did not know what the flag was when he picked it up, and fans were invited to attend the band’s court appearances in solidarity.
Those charges were thrown out in September on procedural grounds. The Crown Prosecution Service lodged an appeal in January, but two high court judges dismissed that appeal on March 11, upholding the original decision.
“I didn’t see it as pressure. Obviously, we do thrive in the chaos, and sometimes it’s easier to deal with things when it’s so chaotic, and you’re onto the next thing,” Chara told NME. “We understood that there were a lot of eyes on this album. Second album syndrome is quite intense for a lot of bands. We knew if you were a Kneecap fan and had been watching what had been going on for the last year, you’d be very disappointed if there was no mention of it in the album. Of course there is, and we wouldn’t let you down.”
That quote captures why Kneecap’s chart moment feels culturally freighted. A Number One would be more than a commercial trophy: it would insist that politicised, Irish-language-inflected hip-hop — music that refuses to separate joke from argument, rage from tenderness — has a place at the centre of the UK’s mainstream reckoning.
At the same time, the presence of Melanie C and Michael Jackson in the equation highlights how different kinds of legacy collide on the charts. One project is a career reinvention from a global pop star; another is the gravitational pull of a catalogue tethered to a major film. Kneecap’s bid sits, uncomfortably and productively, between those forces: contemporary, contentious and very much of-the-moment.
