‘There’s no science for people like us’: electro-punk duo chalk up extended divisions in post-Troubles Belfast | music

IAt Belfast’s Kelly’s Cellars, a bar that has been bringing the city’s people together since 1720, traditional music oozes from somewhere deep inside when Ross Cullen and Benedict Goddard arrive from the street. They settle down in a corner corner and eat pints of tough meat.

Together they form the duo Chalk. When the Kneecap exploded outside Belfast, Chalk’s longer fuse was quietly burning alongside them. Formed when they met while studying film at university, the duo have spent five years crafting a live show that can compete with the best in the UK and Ireland: imagine the joy of Underworld and the warped menace of Nine Inch Nails but rooted in Belfast music, from the punk of Stiff Little Fingers and Rudi to the beats of David Holmes and the rave scene of the Sugar Sweet era. “We wanted to make as much noise as possible with just two people,” Goddard says. “But we never wanted to be limited by that.”

A trilogy of EPs, circumstances shaped by intensity; Their just-released debut album, Crystalpunk, is where the fuse finally meets the charge. “Crystal is beautiful, the electronic side of things, but it’s also very intense and destructive,” Goddard says of the title. “It helped us discover sound; after that, nothing else could be called it.”

Amid the turmoil, Belfast’s music venues can be neutral ground when everything else in the city is predetermined. Chalk’s album is based on the identity crises that came after those years.

The son of an English father and an Irish mother, guitarist and synth player Goddard grew up between Monaghan in Ireland and Armagh in Northern Ireland. In England, he is Irish. In Ireland, it is English. “What was my identity all along?” he asks, not exactly rhetorically. “There’s no science for people like us,” Colin says. “There’s no red hand from Ulster, no tricolour. So we made our own.” The album’s eight-minute centerpiece, Béal Feirste, the Irish name for Belfast, “is about this feeling of being unclaimed on both sides,” he says.

Singing and producing, Colin comes from a mixed-faith family – a Protestant father and a Catholic mother – and his father grew up during the Troubles, putting his fingers through bullet holes in cars. This legacy – of trauma, of a city slowly unraveling itself – runs through the album. “Wherever you are, if your parents are from different religions or different orientations, you can feel the imposter syndrome,” says Colleen. “We want to put a little footnote here and say: This is how it is after all.” In the wake of anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland in 2025, and with the continuing specter of sectarian violence, “there is still a need for unity. No hatred, no division.”

The music is full of local details, like the incendiary song Skem, named after the Cullen graffiti tag found on the side of trains crossing the North. He pictured a passenger hearing it as the Skem sign slid in a blur: “I thought it was worth a try.”

Biel First’s phrase – “shoulder to shoulder” – is taken from the Call of Ireland, the island-wide rugby anthem that quietly manages the community unity that decades of politics have failed to achieve. “I grew up playing rugby,” says Colin. “My dad was the coach, and he would play Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping for me before every practice.” Goddard shakes his head: “Why has sport been able to do what politics cannot?” Colin doesn’t miss a beat: “Athletes generally aren’t trying to be cool. Have you ever seen a goth boxer?”

In the video for the lead single, IDC, Coleen strolls around the city wearing a full-face leather mask studded with spikes and crystals, drawing startled looks from shoppers on Saturday. It embodies another central tension in Chalk: the confrontation of art versus the person who speaks quietly behind the mask.

“I’ve never been in therapy or anything like that, but the purpose of some of these songs is to maybe go back to my youth. Going to school and feeling like you’re a little bit weird, a little bit weirder, your tastes are different: that person will always be there inside you,” Colin says. He matured into it, he says, as he came to know his parents differently as an adult, and gradually became more comfortable in his own skin. “These songs are a vessel that’s been building for a long time – a little bubble floating around, that’s been living inside of me. I can finally let it out.”

They play SXSW this month, ahead of a North American tour and a European tour that concludes back home in May. Goddard, who spent eight years in Belfast and stays put, recalls how a friend said the city was “exaggerating its weight”: culturally, its influence punches well above its weight. “It’s not the most popular way to rock ‘n’ roll, but they’re not wrong. We have a DIY attitude. I’d almost rather have the industry come to us.”

Colin looks up from his drink, traditional music still bleeding from the next room. “We’re playing catch up with other cities, fair enough. But we don’t just want to be here, we want to be a part of what can be.”