It may be a few more weeks until St. Patrick’s Day arrives on March 14, but when it comes to the Dropkick Murphys, it might feel like the band is celebrating the holiday year-round.
“We bring a little bit of St. Patrick’s Day to wherever we are every night, I suppose,” guitarist Tim Brennan said earlier this week.
The Boston-based Celtic punk band are hitting the road next week on their “For the People…In the Pit St. Patrick’s Day 2026 Tour,” with a Feb. 12 stop at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. They’ll be joined by the Aggrolites, Haywire and Slugger.
The band this week released “Citizen I.C.E,” with frontman Ken Casey reworking the lyrics from “Citizen C.I.A.,” a song from their 2005 album, “The Warrior’s Code.”
”(‘Citizen C.I.A.’ is) a song that we play, maybe not every night, but close to it,” Brennan said. “And in light of what was going on, Ken reworked the words to it to turn it into ‘Citizen I.C.E.’ It felt pretty topical.”
The new song will be available on “New England Forever,” a split LP with Haywire that will be available exclusively at the upcoming shows. Each band offered three original songs, plus a cover of the other band.
In a Wednesday phone call from Boston, Brennan spoke with TribLive about the split LP, a return to a heavier sound, his early days with the band and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
How’s the mood in Boston with the Patriots in the Super Bowl this weekend?
Everyone seems pretty good. We were just at their shoving off party the other day, and everyone seemed pretty happy, although the temperature outside has been (expletive) diabolically cold.
Same here, too.
Oh, I can only imagine. We’re at that point in the winter, too, where it’s like, the holidays are over, there ain’t nothing to look forward to. So we’re glad to be hitting the road and playing music every day.
Just in case the Patriots win this weekend, I wouldn’t bring that up on stage in Pittsburgh. There’s still some hard feelings for the Patriots down here.
Oh man, I mean that’s probably the reason that Ken’s gonna bring it up. (laughs) But we’ll see how hard he goes or not.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the band, so are there big plans in the work to mark that?
Oh, yeah, sure. We’re going to do a pretty comprehensive career-spanning set as far as the songs and everything. So, yeah, we’ll pay some special attention to that.
Who came up with that split LP idea?
I think we had all we had just finished our last tour of the year in November. And as far as everyone was concerned, I think we were done for the rest of the year. And then Ken started calling me and talking about the split and telling me that I need to get down in my basement and write two new originals worth of music, which is fine. I’m happy to write music, obviously. So that was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. We were in the studio for a week, and that was it, and it was great.
Is it tougher to write songs under a deadline like that?
You know, it’s funny. Sometimes it is, because there are so many different ways that they can appear. But it is frustrating because you obviously, when you go to start demoing new songs, ideally, you’ve got at least a handful of ideas that you can work on. So, yeah, it is tough when Ken calls me and and says, I’d love to write a new song, and I just kind of got to come up with something. But that being said, my favorite of the two originals, we’ll probably be playing a lot on this tour. But I went down to start working on something. I had zero ideas and then all of a sudden, I had a drum part and then this one little thing, and then as soon as I got that, everything else kind of opened up from there. So it’s one of those things where I know if I hang in there through the “writer’s block” part of it, something’s going to happen. But it can be tough when you feel like you’re working from zero ideas, obviously.
Do you think there’s a chance of “Citizen I.C.E.” being played with Haywire on these upcoming shows?
Oh yeah, that’s entirely possible. Austin (Sparkman), the singer for Haywire, does guest vocals on the recording of it. He and Ken trade off during the verses, so I can almost guarantee that he’ll be running out for that one.
Dropkick Murphys released “For the People” last year, which was a return to more of a heavier sound after two acoustic albums. How much of a challenge was it for the band to shift to an acoustic-based sound, and then also to change back for this most recent album?
There were certainly challenges because we’ve never gone into a studio and recorded an entirely acoustic album before. So there were a few things to figure out, just sort of dynamically speaking, when we were doing the acoustic stuff. So it wasn’t necessarily difficult to switch into that mode, but we did end up learning a lot about recording a purely acoustic album. Having done those, I was (expletive) chomping at the bit because the whole time we were waiting for those acoustic albums to come out, I was writing super heavy music to sort of contrast the fact that we had just done this acoustic thing. So getting back into the other thing, that was easy because I was so excited to sort of juxtapose what we had just done musically, so that was actually pretty fun.
Did you feel reignited/rejuvenated with that new album with the more rocking stuff?
Yeah, and doing something like that gives you a little bit more appreciation for the super loud, bombastic (stuff) that we do as well.
The band made some headlines last year when Ken confronted some right-wing attendees over their shirts, so do you feel like today’s political landscape is fueling this band right now?
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s one of those times where our name is being put out there a little bit more than it normally would be potentially. Obviously, I think just that’s sort of the nature of us, particularly Ken, being outspoken on stage about that sort of thing. So, for a band like us, unfortunately terrible times like this can be kind of fruitful because you write songs about it. So that’s definitely providing us at the moment with a new sort of head of steam. I think I would agree with that.
Do you feel like there’s an overall message or sentiment within the band of what you’re supporting? From what I’ve seen, it’s a lot of working class, blue-collar type stuff. Does that sound about right?
Yeah, there’s always been that element of it. We’re all from total working-class families in New England, and I say it all the time, if we weren’t playing in these clubs, we would be sweeping them up after the show was over. We’re just super fortunate that we get to be on stage and playing. But especially right now, a lot of our new songs, definitely you can feel that sort of aggression that I think is sort of simmering under the surface for a lot of people. But that being said, at this point, politics, whatever, like I’m talking just straight (expletive) humanity, people need to start being good to each other.
The band has a bigger soapbox right now, so who are the bands that helped to shape you politically or otherwise when you were younger?
When the band was starting out – the band started in 1996 and I showed up in 2003 – so I can’t totally speak to where Ken’s mind was starting everything. But I mean he was a huge Stiff Little Fingers fan, he loved Swingin’ Utters and bands like that, just grassroots-style punk bands that were, even if not singing a politically charged song, was just singing about the commonality between people and how we’re so much less different than a lot of people think we are.
You started selling merch for the band before joining, so when was the last time you had to work a merch stand? Is there anything that you miss about those days?
No, there’s nothing I miss about those days. (laughs) Luckily, I haven’t had to do merch in quite a long time. And I was never a merch guy. It was on the Warped Tour in 2003, and I would play one or two songs with the band every night. I think to justify the fact that I was up there for a total of about six minutes every day, they made me sell merch the rest of the day. Luckily I was 20 years old, so I didn’t know any different. I didn’t know that that was an unbelievably miserable job that I was doing. (laughs) Because those merch guys, especially on the Warped Tour, it’s like first off the bus in the morning, last on the bus at night, just all day working and humping boxes full of shirts and stuff. So I have so much respect for those guys.