Despite its resilient exterior, Fontaines D.C.’s music has always evoked a profound sense of soul-searching. In their early days, the Dublin band expressed a belief that ambition was simply enough to transcend circumstance or humdrum surroundings. Their 2019 debut ‘Dogrel’ writhed through skittering guitar passages aplenty, bravura overflowing, the energy often messy and uncontained, but a quiet spirituality at its core – heard in multiple songs about the weight of merely existing – felt humid and pronounced.
Though the five-piece have continued to evolve their aesthetic album to album, this feeling has prevailed in their work. Perhaps nowhere, however, has frontman Grian Chatten’s songwriting felt more arrestingly attuned to the thorny tangle of life than on fourth LP ‘Romance’, an album that charts the devastating duality of its title – primarily the way a love or desire so tender can morph into something near-debilitating.
Like a gale-force wind that swoops in and leaves you undone, the record opens with a blown-out epic in the form of its title track. Chatten sings of being at the mercy of his feelings, emphasised by a cymbal crash that feels akin to a total surrender to sensation. The Deftones-like ‘Here’s The Thing’ is just as wonderfully uneasy, thick with unresolved emotions and squalling instrumentals.
Where predecessor ‘Skinty Fia’ was steadfast in communicating its central themes (from guilt and disillusionment to new beginnings), ‘Romance’ takes its time unravelling. Part glowing love song, part troubled revelation, ‘In The Modern World’ foregrounds dystopian imagery against a muted hallucinatory haze. A desperate, self-lacerating urge to destroy is wrapped up in some futuristic sheen on ‘Starburster’: “I wanna take the truth without a lens on it / My God-given insanity, it depends on it,” Chatten spits breathlessly, as though he’s a single chord change away from melting down entirely.
At this year’s Glastonbury, where Fontaines D.C. headlined the Park stage, Chatten rounded off their performance with a brief shoutout to Danish climate researcher and author Nikolaj Schultz. It felt indicative of how ‘Romance’ is the band’s most considered and intricately crafted release yet, dotted with wide-ranging allusions to decay (a cascading ‘Sundowner’), apocalyptic visions and all the ghosts who have passed through their lives (‘Death Kink’). ‘Romance’ offers moments of wonder and gravity while also feeling occasionally foreboding.
Much of its power, therefore, comes from the way the discomfiting mood is offset by the lusciousness of the melodies. “Ah, it makes sense when you understand / The misery made me another marked man,” Chatten sings towards the end of closer ‘Favourite’, a celebration of the past and all its learnings. These final, perfectly-chosen words will only take on a life of their own and reverberate onwards.
