Fontaines D.C.
Fontaines D.C. are Irish. So Irish they’ve got Dublin City built into their name; so Irish that their debut album opens with the lyric, Dublin City in the rain is mine / A pregnant city with a Catholic mind; and so Irish that lead singer Grian Chatten holds the mic with a shamrock-tatted wrist. The band regularly invokes Irish-language idioms in their songwriting and titles, perhaps most amusingly the phrase “Skinty Fia,” an ancient Irish swear that loosely translates to “For f%&k’s sake!” Arguably the biggest rock band out of Ireland since U2, they topped the UK and Irish charts with 2022’s “Skinty Fia,” and their ambitious, genre-bending release, “Romance,” is set to make an even bigger splash.
Fontaines D.C. are so Irish that not only do they routinely allude to famed Dublin-born modernist James Joyce in their lyrics, but they first bonded as a band over pints and a shared admiration of his poetry. In an NME interview from earlier this year, Chatten spoke of making his “daily reference to Joyce,” then compared the opening and closing tracks on “Romance” to that most daunting of Joyce’s novels, “Finnegan’s Wake,” which begins with the second half of a sentence, the first half of which is offered as the novel’s final line.
One of the more notable lessons Chatten and his bandmates—guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, bassist Conor Deegan III, and drummer Tom Coll—surely learned from Joyce is that it sometimes takes leaving a place to understand it fully. Joyce absconded to Paris from Ireland in his early twenties, an act of artistic survival in the face of a culture he found stifling, and after the age of thirty-two never returned to his homeland. Yet the more cosmopolitan and globally renowned Joyce became, the more Irish he wrote. The city of Dublin remained his one true setting; his love-hate push and pull with his Irish upbringing, his obsessive topic.
Like Joyce before them, Fontaines D.C. are poised to command the global stage. Yet even as their sound evolves beyond the Irish post-punk of their earliest days, a different kind of Irishness—more a sensibility than a sonic style—has remained. They, too, have never stopped returning imaginatively to Dublin.
Fontaines D.C.
The band burst onto the UK scene in 2019 with “Dogrel,” a record that’s bold, brash and—good as it is—a little too like the music the band’s worthiest peers (IDLES, Shame, The Murder Capital) were also recording at the time. Yet even in the early days, Fontaines D.C. found ways to distinguish itself. On “Dogrel,” Chatten wields his Irish brogue like an untuned instrument, narrating a tour of Dublin’s beer-soaked pubs and rain-spattered streets with a we’ve-gotta-get-out-of-this-place urgency. More plain punky than post-punk, the album’s best two tracks, “Big” and “Boys In the Better Land,” aren’t so much odes to Dublin as they are a cri de coeur from lads desperate to leave their parochial haunts behind: My childhood was small. But I’m gonna be big!
It’s not all piss and vinegar on “Dogrel,” though. The band reserves space to lament a beloved city being changed for the worse by gentrification and unfettered capitalism. “Dublin City Sky,” sung in a Shane MacGowanesque lilt, makes clear that for all their raging, rock ’n’ roll street cred, Fontaines D.C. can craft an inward-facing Irish folk ballad with the best of them.
Fontaines D.C.’s “A Hero’s Death”
The band’s sophomore effort, the Grammy-nominated “A Hero’s Death,” brought a more layered, sophisticated Britpop sound to bear. There’s a dreamy quality to much of the second record, with lush Oasis-styled production and guitar work. A handful of tracks, most notably “A Lucid Dream” and “Televised Mind,” lean sharper and harder, with a psychedelic garage sound reminiscent of early Stooges.
The song “A Hero’s Death” is a revelation. On the surface Chatten’s lyrics skirt dangerously close to the banal, as he percusses in slowed hip-hop-styled vocals: Don’t get stuck in the past / Say your favorite things at Mass / Tell your mother that you love her/ And go out of your way for others / Sit beneath a light that suits you / And look forward to a brighter future. The change-your-life affirmations are bookended by a single line Chatten repeats over and over, as if desperate to convince his listeners, and maybe himself: Life ain’t always empty. Strokes-inspired, altogether danceable, “A Hero’s Death” is a track that was just begging to be remixed for the club scene (and, thanks to Belgian DJ collective Soulwax, soon was).
Fontaines D.C.’s “Skinty Fia”
In 2020 the band (except for Conor Curley) decamped to London, as on-the-rise rock stars are wont to do. Two years later Fontaines D.C. released “Skinty Fia.” If the band’s first two albums made the case, however ambivalently, for leaving Dublin, “Skinty Fia” speaks to what happens once you actually do. Clearly, the boys aren’t in the better land.
Chatten has spoken candidly about the everyday anti-Irish sentiment he encountered upon relocating to England’s capital, and “Skinty Fia” is a record acutely aware of imperial England’s long oppression of the Irish. With its dark red and black album art, dirge-like, Joy Division-inspired sound, and guitars that slash across the beat like bleak omens, it conjures a deeper, darker mood.
Chatten wrote “Skinty Fia”’s operatic, organ-based opening track, “‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’”—which in Irish means “in our hearts forever”—to protest the Church of England’s refusal to allow that Irish-language phrase on the tombstone of an Irishwoman buried in an English cemetery, deeming it too political. The album’s best song, “Roman Holiday,” takes us for a night out in London, the singer wanting to get the girl, get stoned, get inside whatever the essence of this new place might be—but he can’t. It’s a song about being Irish within an England still “snuffing out hopes, and blotting out suns” the way it did when, as the saying goes, the sun never set on the British empire. Yet has any song so sadly cynical ever managed to sound so sexy? When Chatten sings Baby, come on, get your high heels on / It’s the body is cold / it’s the course is run, he’s making the case that when things go wrong, we can both get our groove on and fight for a better day.
Like the early career Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C. have for the last half decade been making music so good that whatever formula they’ve been following surely bears repeating. To their credit, they’ve declined to do this. Perhaps the familiarity with leaving things behind—both the good and the bad—has fostered an aesthetic restlessness in the band.
Fontaines D.C.’s “Romance”
Which brings us to “Romance,” Fontaines D.C.’s extraordinary new record. It’s a nomad’s album, really: many of the songs were written on the road, far from Dublin and London. All that globetrotting has served the record well, as has the decision, perhaps inspired by their 2023 tour in support of Arctic Monkeys, to bring on legendary producer James Ford, best known for his work with that band.
In an interview with NME, Chatten noted that “Romance” takes its inspirations less from other musical genres and more from a visual aesthetic. “The colors I hear in [“Romance”’s] music are not the colors you find in nature… They sound neon, ridiculous even.” It’s an aesthetic that’s also shaped the band’s wraparound 2024 tour style. Out with the band’s former indie-rocker-meets-normcore look; in with clown red-hair and acid green jackets just a shade away from Charlie XCX’s everywhere all the time Brat green. It’s a slightly off-kilter color palette that’s meant to feel unsettling, perhaps even to signal the low-grade dystopian themes “Romance” explores.
The album’s opening track, “Romance,” lays down the end-times vibe. With its slow cantering bass, horror-movie keys, Depeche Mode moodiness, and violent percussive crashes which hint at brewing storms, it’s song as cinema, teasing us with movie-soundtrack dramatics. Maybe romance is a place, Chatten incants in the song’s final build, seeking refuge in love as the world burns.
“Starburster,” our candidate for the year’s best single and arguably “Romance”’s most ambitious track, is equally unnerving. Inspired by a panic attack Chatten experienced on a train in London, the song fuses electronica, minor-key hip-hop, psychedelic rock, and, quite brilliantly, breathwork. The gasps between the vocals make us live Chatten’s panic with him even as he enlists us in his desperate pursuit of a consoling high: I’m gon’ hit your business, if it’s momentary blissness.
On “Here’s the Thing,” Chatten experiments with the high end of his vocal range, pushing through almost failing notes with abandon. The song is a plea to retrieve the past—And if you change your mind, I will be waiting—and a reminder of how terrifying, yet riveting the prospect of losing someone can be. Other songs on the album find Fontaines D.C. appropriating U2 and living up to the comparison (“In the Modern World”), brilliantly revisiting the Pixies and their many grunge descendants (“Bug” and “Death Kink”), and returning yet again to James Joyce as inspiration (“Horseness Is the Whatness”).
At first listen, “Romance”’s closing track, “Favourite,” sounds buoyant and neon-bright, unabashedly pilfering the upbeat guitar riffs of that later-era Cure classic “Just Like Heaven.” But all the musical cheer soon gives way to something sadder. The song isn’t a celebration, it’s a meditation on the fine art of letting go: I can split the sunshine to the day / And stick your heart to everything you say / To be gone, be gone, be gone, be gone, be gone / You were my favourite for a long time. Moving between the past (You were my favourite) and the haunted present (You’ve been my favourite), Chatten explores the fraught experience of holding on to someone, some place, some time—long after it would have been wise to let go. The favorite at the heart of this song may well be a lover—but it’s just as likely the abandoned Irish homeland. “Favourite” is, at its core, a love song sung to one’s own past.
And there’s the throughline in the Fontaines D.C. oeuvre. Their songs return time and again to the question of home: where we find it, why we leave it, who embodies it, and how it retains such a powerful psychic hold on us. Like Joyce writing about Dublin from Paris, yet speaking to the whole world, Chatten and company have diffused loss, memory, nostalgia for what was, and longing for what could be into a musical sensibility that speaks to other experiences of alienation in the modern world. It’s a safe bet that the band will keep braving new spaces. But it’s hard not to imagine that Fontaines D.C. will continue to explore that very Irish worry, rooted in the history of a colonized people, that when we leave home, we’re playing a part in its being erased.
The Fontaines D.C. at the Salt Shed, 1357 North Elston, saltshedchicago.com. 17 and over, October 9, 7:30pm (6:30pm doors).
Anne K. Ream (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”) is a writer and the co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, a global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations. A frequent writer for Newcity, she is a contributor to “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” and the co-creator of Hear to Be Heard, a blues and rock benefit concert series.
R. Clifton Spargo (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”), author of the novel “Beautiful Fools,” is a novelist, short-story writer and cultural and music critic. His writings on music have appeared in Huffington Post, The Yale Review, “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan,” and regularly in Newcity. He is co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, and teaches creative writing at Yale University.
