Despite putting out three very good records between 2019 and 2022, I’ve never fancied Fontaines D.C. to be much of a chameleonic band. Since forming in Dublin in 2017, the Irish five-piece have climbed their way to the top of the post-punk ladder, becoming one of the genre’s most recognizable and favorable acts. In 2021, their sophomore LP A Hero’s Death scored a Grammy nomination. Their 2022 breakthrough, Skinty Fia, went #1 in their home country and landed them on every global festival bill you can imagine and, eventually, as the opening act on a massive Arctic Monkeys tour. Once upon a time, during the band’s Dogrel days, Fontaines D.C. were one of music’s best-kept secrets. Now, you’d be hard-pressed to rub shoulders with somebody who doesn’t know their name.
In this day and age, finding a group that can pull off a consistent clip of good tunes is a hero’s journey of its own accord (not every band can be Spoon!). And, despite how sympathetic contemporary criticism has become to the art and labor of music-making (places like The Guardian and NME, outlets that love Fontaines D.C., give out five-star review scores to practically anyone in 2024), it’s still rare to see a band vault to such a high expectation of quality, shoot it up in flames and ham up the velocity as the ashes settle. Fontaines D.C. are one of those bands.
Skinty Fia remains a perfect album, and likely one of the greatest Irish albums of this millennium. These days, everyone and their mother is a post-punk band. The genre is not tapped out of ideas or sounds, and there’s an unfortunately dire amount of redundancy going on within it—hence why bands like Squid and shame and Courting have all put out fine albums in the last 20 months that have underwhelmed more than they’ve triumphed. None of those bands have anything new to say yet, not sonically at least.
With Skinty Fia’s already impressive legacy (despite it being barely 30 months old) in mind, you’d be right to enter Fontaines D.C.’s newest album, Romance, with some hesitation. In-between those two records, bandleader Grian Chatten put out his debut solo LP, Chaos For the Fly, which nurtured a slower-paced, baroque attitude. That project felt like the perfect vehicle for Chatten’s often abstract lyricism; its singer-songwriter paint scheme was the perfect context for his woozy vernacular and dreamlike, sugar-sweet inclinations to thrive in. Chaos For the Fly possessed, in many ways, a sense of vibrancy that Fontaines D.C.’s catalog has lacked over the last five years.
But Dogrel, A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia existing without bright and bold colors is not a demerit against Fontaines D.C., largely since those records—especially Skinty Fia—were swift denouncements of Dublin’s cultural decay, a choice that doesn’t necessarily beckon technicolor hues. The homesickness that Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Tom Coll and Conor Deegan III reckoned with on those 10 songs was far more indicative of a sentimentality for a life stripped away from them and from the people they love than existing as some measurement of a routine centered around non-stop touring. Fontaines D.C. were terrified of getting older and getting more and more bitter. “I Love You” is a perfect encapsulation of that, as Chatten balances romantic affections with mentions of bastards, Jaws allusions that parallel the mass graves found at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, genocide and the “system in our hearts.”
On Dogrel and A Hero’s Death, they knocked the door off the hinges and experimented with larger-than-life, drug-through-the-dirt soundscapes that were piercingly garage-influenced. Chatten, who was so often likened to Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, spiritually delivered his messages like an Irish Iggy Pop instead, rolling around on shards of glass and smearing his blood on the microphone. It was all so claustrophobic and alienating; Fontaines D.C. mastered how to make stories of isolation and generational erosion sound extra gnarly on tracks like “Jackie Down the Line,” “Roman Holiday” and “Nabokov.”
Romance is the most diverse record Fontaines D.C. has made yet and, at various intervals, is one of the most perplexing releases of 2024 that I’ve encountered, simply because its high points are such skyscraping milestones that even the mundane “low points” aren’t banal enough to sound derivative or uninspired. Signing with XL and tapping James Ford to produce their fourth LP is a potent cocktail that Fontaines D.C. have weaponized impressively—spending their new label resources on a collaborator responsible for orchestrating and galvanizing some of the more auspicious career turns of the last five years—chief among them Arctic Monkeys’ The Car, Depeche Mode’s Memento Mori and Geese’s 3D Country. But Fontaines D.C. aren’t concerned with making their image fit into someone else’s vision. They employ a Rolodex of citations on Romance—like the Cure, Deftones, Pixies, amorphous grunge collages and a smorgasbord of ‘90s alt-pop bands that faded into obscurity just as soon as they detonated—but never sound like anything other than themselves.
You can hear that truth from the first note of Romance, as the title track begins with an arresting, menacing slow-burn of plucky, crucified singing from Chatten, who bellows “I will be beside you ‘til you’re dead” with a lick of delicacy that becomes enraptured in a tempest blow-out of shivering, droning distortion. It’s an announcement and a battlecry: “Maybe romance is the place for me and you, and you, and you,” Chatten confides, as his bandmates swirl into each other and puncture the tempo with a cinematic climax that is as bombastically poisonous as it is, under its bruising skin, reflective and hopeful. Elsewhere on Romance, there’s a Deafheaven-like wall of pain on the Conor Curley-sung “Sundowner” that mimics Chatten’s poetic waxing on the different shapes of decay, while “Death Kink” finds him spouting end-times rhetoric that unwind the pigments of captivation that exist on tracks like the effervescent, quixotic “Motorcyle Boy” or the James Joyce-referencing, Carlos O’Connell-penned, atmospheric and symphonic balladry of “Horseness is the Whatness.”
The strings that underscore “Horseness is the Whatness” echo Ford’s involvement, as he brought a similar touch to Beth Gibbons’s Lives Outgrown and Pet Shop Boys’ Nonetheless earlier this year. Chatten’s turn as a folk troubadour on Chaos For the Fly last summer plays out on Romance, too, as the R.E.M.-influenced “Bug” and the Lana Del Rey-summoning “In the Modern World” manifest softened, acoustic tendrils. But those tracks saunter into orchestral harmonies plumed with hallucinatory gestures just as quickly. Chatten’s verbiage is as nonchalant as it is pensive and earnest. “Seems so hard just to be,” he admits on “In the Modern World.” “If it matters, you complete me.” A song that, in that band’s own words, is about “a fictional throuple together amid armageddon,” “In the Modern World” illustrates Fontaines D.C.’s fascination with what comforts can outmuscle carnage—or, at the very least, glow from within it. (“I feel alive in the city you like” is also an immediate contender for my favorite line of the year.)
But like I said, Fontaines D.C. have never screamed “chameleonic” to me, and that’s because their first three albums exist in the same train of thought—LP-length juxtapositions of pleasure and brutality. Romance, however, leans much further into the pleasure of it all without skimping on the brutality. Life is prickly and relentless, the band argues across 11 songs, but it’s also beautiful and worth surrendering to. When Fontaines D.C. re-emerged at Warsaw in Brooklyn in May donning a look straight out of 1999, it felt like either a one-off ruse or a heavily-dated shtick that was too light on the irony. Their pink-dyed hair, bug-eyed, wrap-around sunglasses and parachute pants straight out of an MC Hammer music video culminated into a tone-setting affair, however, emphasized a month later by their cover shoot with Crack. The band had taken the bright ambit of MTV-fueled yesteryear and made a game of dress-up out of it. It all would’ve been so painfully dorky if the music draped around it wasn’t so blissfully good.
Fontaines D.C. level-out on “Starburster,” a certifiable dance tune that skitters and jerks under the thumb of Chatten’s unwavering, chain-link warble: “I wanna bite the phone, I wanna bleed the one, I wanna see you alone, alone.” After beginning on a humming note that calls to mind the introduction to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the Dubliners unleash a laundry list of imagery on you, mentioning everything from striking with the SAG to the pig on a Chinese calendar. Chatten ties it all up with a bow: “It’s moral tyranny keeping it from me.” When a soft-spoken interlude hits, “Starburster” makes it clear that Fontaines D.C. are still harbingers of a refined, delectable chaos. And when “Favourite” arrived weeks later, it arrived with perfection. It’s a chest-bursting, terminally sweet earworm that finds Chatten and his mates experimenting with a far poppier tone than usual.
If “Starburster” was frenetic and energized through an anxiety personified, “Favourite” is the lullaby meant to cushion its collapse. “Stitch and fall, the faces rearranged,” Chatten sings. “You will see beauty give the way to something strange.” “Favourite” is immediately one of Fontaines D.C.’s best songs ever, a “continuous cycle from euphoria to sadness, two worlds spinning together.” There’s well-worn poetry and intimacy in the candy-coated, rocking and rollicking arrangement; a sense of longing that swirls around the endearments. “Favourite” being the final number on Romance, there’s bliss in how Fontaines D.C. mangles those syrupy pastorals by plugging them into far heavier textures earlier in the tracklist, like on the harsh, crushing “Desire”—a song that doesn’t stretch the album’s elastic but still sounds pretty good even when it’s spinning its tires.
On Romance, defying expectations becomes fashionable for Fontaines D.C. Love the band or hate them, these 11 tracks never simmer in the aesthetic tropes they wore well on A Hero’s Death or Skinty Fia. The guitars are far more lush, and even the most onerous, deafening comedowns of distortion sound poppier and histrionic than what we’re used to hearing from Chatten, O’Connell, Curley, Coll and Deegan. The stories are tragic and the days within them are numbered, but Romance is an essay of mosh-pit guitars careening into baggy desires and stringed visions of mercy. This album’s violence stretches itself around the cinema of living. One of the last lines Grian Chatten sings on it is “each new day, I get another year older.” Like yesterday and tomorrow, Romance is a bloody mess. I adore every second of it.
Read our 2023 feature on Fontaines D.C. here.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
