Fseveral debuts in recent years have had an opening as impressive as Big, the first track on Fontaines DC’s 2019 album Dogrel. A minute and 45 seconds of frenetic double-time drumming, simmering guitar and vocals mixed high and without reverb – so that it felt like frontman Grian Chatten was screaming the lyrics about six inches from your face – heralded the Dublin quintet as by far the most shrill and exciting of the late 2010s wave of bands that combined post-punk with Sprechgesang Singing: “I was small as a child,” Chatten kept shouting, “but I will be big.”
It was a song that could have been interpreted in a number of ways – an examination of the band’s obviously complex relationship with the confines of their hometown; a satire on naked ambition and unattainable dreams – but it inevitably sounded like what Fontaines DC didn’t want: a statement of intent. Frankly, their later career hardly suggested a band trying to please everyone. Their second album, A Hero’s Death, was released in 2020, full of distrust of the fame Dogrel had brought them; 2022’s Skinty Fia was dark, sophisticated and mostly mournfully paced, but still reached No. 1.
But as if you never quite know what to expect from Fontaines DC, Skinty Fia’s follow-up makes you wonder if they’ve reconsidered Big’s statement about their high-flying ambition. You’d hesitate to call it a more cheerful album than its predecessor – the first words you hear are “into the darkness again”. But it’s definitely more colourful, as Fontaines DC themselves are these days. Their deliberately anonymous, casual image has been traded for dyed hair, kaleidoscopic clothing and sunglasses; bassist Conor Deegan and guitarist Carlos O’Connell could now pass as supporting members of The Prodigy in their Firestarter finery.
The sonic transformation isn’t quite so dramatic – you could draw a direct line between the simmering shoegaze guitars of Sundowner and Skinty Fia’s final song, Nabokov, and most of the songs on Romance that are actually about romance are as tonally uneasy and ambiguous as Fontaines DC’s songs about Ireland. Still, it’s a transformation. Their sound has expanded to include string-heavy ballads (the James Joyce-inspired Horseness Is the Whatness and In the Modern World), the synth sounds of the title track, the Faith-era gloom of the Cure, and, on the utterly charming final song Favourite, pre-Madchester indie music by John Peel.
The band’s youthful love of nu-metal has also been incorporated into the mix, though the latter influence is more subtly displayed: Had they not mentioned Korn and Deftones in interviews, you’d assume the vocals on Starburster’s verses were straight out of hip-hop. And while the riff on “Here’s the Thing” could be belted out by a guitarist in baggy shorts and an oversized basketball jersey, it’s less noticeable than the song’s octave jumps. The latter aspect seems crucial: The most obvious musical change on Romance is the decision to foreground a gift for pop melodies that had been lurking subtly since their debut album’s “Television Screens” and which Chatten fully demonstrated on his folky solo album, 2023’s Chaos for the Fly.
The resulting album feels like it’s driven by a constant back-and-forth between contrasting elements. Bursts of lush orchestration are peppered by Chatten’s raw, rock-hard voice, which is so distinctive that wherever the album ventures musically, it automatically sounds like Fontaines DC. At the same time, the sweetness of the melodies is tempered by the spikiness of the playing – even on the slowest pieces, the acoustic guitars sound like they’re being absolutely thrashed – and by what Chatten is actually singing. The musical lightness of Favourite fights against lyrics that depict someone stumbling along after a binge, paranoid, confused and “eaten out of shape like a stone on the shore”.
As popular Dublin band Gilla Band often does, Starburster depicts a panic attack in surprisingly funny fashion – a jumble of chaotic, disjointed thoughts that alternately deal with Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO), Catholicism, the 2023 Sag-Aftra actors’ strike and JD Salinger. The humor is periodically lightened, however, by the unsettling sound of Chatten gasping loudly and desperately for air.
after newsletter campaign
Romance is more immediately accessible than any Fontaines DC album to date – you can imagine Desire getting a huge crowd singing along. But it loses none of the band’s power in the process: excitingly, it still has the same dirty, worn, aggressive qualities as their previous work. There’s clearly an opportunity right now for an alternative guitar band to break into festival headliner and packed stadium territory. Romance definitely sounds like a band vying for that vacancy, but it’s not a cowardly attempt to reach the masses: it invites a larger audience into the world of Fontaines DC, but it never begs them to accept. One suspects they’ll take the offer anyway.
This week Alexis heard
Salute – One of These Nights (ft. Empress Of)
If you’re looking for a fresh soundtrack for the dog days of summer, Salute’s debut album, True Magic, should be your go-to: It includes “One of Those Nights,” which fuses French house, soulful UKG, and fidgety, fast-paced beats into a seductive whole.
