‘There’s no flag for people like us’: electro-punk duo Chalk on spanning divides in post-Troubles Belfast

Ross Cullen and Benedict Goddard’s music is as hybrid as they are, with their Protestant-Catholic and English-Irish heritages. They explain why they still need to counter hate

In Belfast’s Kelly’s Cellars, a bar that has been bringing the city’s people together since 1720, trad music bleeds from somewhere deep within as Ross Cullen and Benedict Goddard arrive mizzle-damp from the street. They settle into a corner alcove and reach for two pints of stout.

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

A trilogy of EPs, Conditions, forged the intensity; their just-released debut album, Crystalpunk, is where the fuse finally meets the charge. “Crystal being beautiful, the electronic side of things, but also quite sharp and destructive,” Goddard says of the title. “It helped us figure out the sound; after that, it couldn’t be named anything else.”

Amid the Troubles, Belfast’s music venues could be neutral ground when everything else in the city came preassigned. Chalk’s album is anchored in the identity crises that came after those years.

Guitarist and synth player Goddard, with an English father and Irish mother, grew up between Monaghan in Ireland and Armagh in Northern Ireland. In England, he is Irish; in Ireland, he is English. “What was my identity the whole time?” he asks, not entirely rhetorically. “There’s no flag for people like us,” Cullen says. “No Red Hand of Ulster, no tricolour. So we made our own.” He says the album’s eight-minute centrepiece, Béal Feirste, the Irish name for Belfast, is “about that feeling of being unclaimed on both sides”.

Cullen, on vocals and production, comes from a mixed-religion family – Protestant father, Catholic mother – and his father grew up during the Troubles, putting his fingers through bullet holes in cars. That inheritance – of trauma, of a city slowly unknotting itself – runs through the album. “Wherever you’re from, if your parents are from different religions or different sides, you can feel that impostor syndrome,” Cullen says. “We want to put our own little footnote in there and say: this is what it’s like after all that.” In the wake of anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland in 2025, and with the spectre of sectarian violence still heavy, “there still feels the need to come together. No hate, no division.”

The music is full of local detail, such as the searing Skem, named after a graffiti tag Cullen clocked on the side of trains crossing the North. He pictured a commuter hearing it just as the Skem tag slides past in a blur: “I thought it was worth a shot.”

Béal Feirste’s refrain – “shoulder to shoulder” – is drawn from Ireland’s Call, the all-island rugby anthem that quietly manages the cross-community unity that decades of politics couldn’t. “I grew up playing rugby,” says Cullen. “My dad was the coach; he used to play me Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping before every practice.” Goddard shakes his head: “Why has sport been able to do what politics can’t?” Cullen doesn’t miss a beat: “Sportspeople aren’t generally trying to be cool. Have you ever seen a goth boxer?”

In the video for the lead single, IDC, Cullen wanders through the city wearing a full-face leather mask studded with spikes and crystals, drawing startled looks from Saturday shoppers. It captures another central tension in Chalk: the confrontation of the art versus the softly spoken person behind the mask.

“I’ve never been to therapy or anything like that,” Cullen says, “but the purpose of some of these songs is maybe me going back to younger me. Going to school and just feeling like a bit of an outsider, a little bit weirder, your taste is different: that person will always exist in you.” He has grown into it, he says – getting to know his parents differently as an adult, slowly becoming more comfortable in himself. “These songs are a vessel that’s been building up for a long time – a little bubble that floats, that’s been living in me. I can finally let it out.”

They played SXSW this month, before a North American run and a European tour that finishes back home in May. Goddard, eight years in Belfast and staying put, remembers how a friend said the city “over-indexes”: culturally speaking, it punches far above its weight. “Not the most rock’n’roll way to put it, but they’re not wrong. We have such a DIY attitude. I’d almost rather the industry come to us.”

Cullen looks up from his pint, the trad music still bleeding from the next room. “We’re playing catchup on other cities, fair enough. But not only do we want to be here, we want to be part of what it could be.”

• Crystalpunk is out now on Alter Music