There’s a moment halfway through Fontaines DC’s new album, Romance, when everything changes. A strumming guitar arrives into something of an empty expanse, and In the Modern World begins. Fontaines DC have some fine songs. This, however, is something else. It runs like a tectonic fault across not just the album but the Irish band’s own landscape. From here on they are clearly in another realm.
Since Grian Chatten, Tom Coll, Conor Curley, Carlos O’Connell and Conor Deegan III broke through with their 2019 album, Dogrel, the ambition and expansiveness of their music have repeatedly threatened to burst out from a tone often described as claustrophobic.
That debut album was creatively rooted in Dublin. It said so in its opening line: “Dublin in the rain is mine.” Their second album, the Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, sometimes slowed the tempo and upped the atmospheric anxiety but continued the band-in-a-room feeling. Its opening hook was “I don’t belong to anyone”. Their third, Skinty Fia, was something of a diasporic reflection, staring across the Irish Sea from London.
This process of growth has also brought a shedding. There have been countless tours, four albums in half a decade, along with Chatten’s 2023 solo record, Chaos for the Fly, and now a new era – visually, sonically, lyrically and perhaps even spiritually.
“Into the darkness again,” Romance begins. The album’s arc is pronounced, ending on the beautiful Favourite. Whereas previous Fontaines LPs had a tendency to plough a furrow so tight that the sounds’ internal worlds rarely risked breaching their boundaries, this one is on a new plain, one of imagination, futurism and potentiality.
The album is influenced, the band say, by the Japanese film Akira, the anime series Cowboy Bebop, the feeling that permeates the city of Shibuya at 6am, Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty, his fellow director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy and, perhaps most of all, the book Land Sickness by their friend Nikolaj Schultz. (To play it live they have needed to take on an additional touring member, Chilli Jesson.)
“I feel freed,” says Chatten, the band’s vocalist. Romance isn’t just a title but a philosophy that underpins the entire endeavour. “I think of it as a kind of fantastical space, an escapist place inside yourself.” Liberated, they have created a record that expands their emotional interior outwards. Chatten has always wanted to explore the grandiose musically. “I think, on this record, we’ve really finally done that.”
[ Starburster: Fontaines DC’s thrillingly sinister new single is a dystopian belterOpens in new window ]
So how did this all happen? “I write regardless and we write regardless,” Chatten says. “We write individually. It’s just always there, you know? If it wasn’t for the production of records taking nine months, and then the campaign and the press and the touring, we’d probably be releasing a lot more music.”
O’Connell, who plays guitar and synths, says the “pool of themes” at the outset of making an album “often starts quite sprawling and unfocused ... It’s only once we’ve allowed ourselves to explore the music and the words without expectations that we usually find a thread that joins certain songs together”.
The album was produced by the prolific, influential James Ford. He brought patience to the studio, which is difficult to maintain in an “intense creative environment that is bound by deadline”, O’Connell says. But detail comes only with patience, he says. And there is so much detail here.
The band wrote a lot on tour, on the road with Arctic Monkeys last year. A period in a house in France – it was intense, according to O’Connell; “kind of tricky, to be honest”, according to Deegan; and “f**king mad”, according to Coll – created a sense of immersion. Coll, the band’s drummer, says he probably left the house only three times in three weeks. They would wake up, surrounded by amps and equipment, and get to work. “You have to become absorbed by that which you’re creating,” O’Connell says. “If you don’t, what’s the point?”
Early last year, Chatten says: “it felt to me that we were speeding off the edge of a cliff.” They had just ended a tour in Japan, had made a bit of money and were asking each other what to do next. “I really felt this overwhelming sense of freedom that wasn’t necessarily a nice thing. It was kind of a void as well.” Chatten impulsively gravitated towards Los Angeles “for some bizarre f**king reason, because I don’t like it there, really, but I find it interesting ... LA reaches you, at least. At least it makes you feel something ...
“It reached across the void of my numbness at that point, I think. I feel huge degree of sadness [there] ... There’s an inherent loneliness to it all. I found that just overwhelming.” He pauses, then revises his assessment. “I don’t really think that I like or dislike anywhere. I just find it interesting or uninteresting, inspiring or uninspiring. And I think that place has a lot of friction for me.”
Unsure what to do, he didn’t bother adjusting to the time zone. Instead he would wake in the evening and head to the Lotus Lounge, a bar in East Hollywood. He ended up briefly working there, pulling pints. He doesn’t want to be “too cheesy”, but he had a sense of feeling “Lana Del Rey’s spirit ... I also felt this sense of death or afterlife, because of the fact of the tour being over, and I was on my own. I felt like I wasn’t anyone, that I didn’t have much of a personality. I didn’t really know who I was. There’s something about the west coast of America to me in its sleepiness, and the kind of perceived heavenliness of it, and the underbelly and all that kind of shit. It just feels really like death to me.”
This pearly-gates melancholy, as Chatten describes it, began to inform what would become In the Modern World. The song is certainly indebted to Del Rey, but also to the beat poets. “Come away with me and Sal,” one line goes. “That song, I get visions of On the Road, Jack Kerouac, driving through the desert in America,” says Deegan, the band’s bass player. “The beat-up 1950s car, right? And they stop into the motel for some warm cans of beer. The AC isn’t working. The fan is spinning half-speed. All that shit.”
Could In the Modern World be a response to Big, the opening track of their debut album, refracted through time? “It’s kind of funny to imagine that narrator going from his ambition to where he’s at right now,” Deegan says. “It’s something that we would have always dreamed to have written when we were in music college but never would have thought we could pull off, somehow. To get to a stage where we’re confident enough in ourselves as a band and songwriters that we could actually do it, it’s such a world away from Big.”
Curley, the band’s guitarist, remembers first hearing an early demo of the song at Chatten’s home in London. He watched Chatten as the singer looked at the speakers. “Jesus, this is going to be really different. This is going to be really exciting,” Curley recalls thinking. When it came to recording the full version of the “lyrically unbelievable” track, Curley felt his role was to help make it the “huge, huge song” it was meant to be.
Chatten couldn’t bear the sound of his voice in the Dogrel days. When the band finished recording the album with the producer Dan Carey, they sat down for a listening party. Chatten left the room for the pub, only returning once the album had ended. Things couldn’t be more different now. “I feel like I’m falling into place a little bit more as I get older maybe,” he says. “It really feels like a self-acceptance thing.”
He stops himself. “I feel like I’m at a spiritual summer camp saying that. But do you know what I mean? I’m allowing the voice to come out now, as opposed to pulling it out. I love my voice on this record. I don’t think I ever have before.” There are moments on Romance when his voice takes flight, making unexpected air-filled turns, and others when his voice descends, as though plunging into a well.
The lyrics and vocal style of Starburster, the first single from the new album, emerged in response to a panic attack. Chatten was tired of feeling anxious – angry about it, in fact. The song was about directing his anger at the problem. Its sense of swag comes from a collective sense of belief in their ability. Chatten also identifies “a certain sexual energy on the record”, and a lustiness. This, he says, feels like “an entirely new colour to paint with. I feel that’s been a forbidden colour for me for a long time, because it was self-aggrandising, or felt a bit indulgent. But I just realised that there’s a whole other dimension to writing if you allow something like that in”.
Chatten says he was diagnosed with ADHD this year, and is learning to have more compassion for himself as the child who features in old camcorder sections of the video for Favourite. “The facial expressions I’m making, I’m clearly at the mercy of the music, and I’m in that moment entirely uninhibited by trying to look good or anything like that,” he says. “That still happens when I go on stage now. I still look like a f**king eejit. I still feel as affected by it and as out of my head when we’re playing.”
The whole band “become extroverts – we become entertainers” – on tour, Deegan says. “But that doesn’t exactly fulfil the artistic hunger inside, or the need to express something exactly ... Art, for a lot of people, is an introvert’s way of expressing themselves.”
Their ethic of writing constantly, even on the road, is key, says Deegan. “You have to show up for that moment whether it comes or not. If you’re not sitting in front of your piano, or your guitar or your laptop, making music, you’re just not making it. Whether it’s good or bad, you have to show up. And the more you show up, the more often those times are that it’s going to be good. You put the work into your craft or your trade so that there are fewer barriers between you and an idea when you have it, so you can just get it across quicker. That work pays off.”
Curley recently found himself listening to a lot of Massive Attack’s early work, and to Portishead. Another touchstone was Bowery Electric, in particular the American band’s track Freedom Fighter, whose influence you can sense on Starburster. He was interested in sounds that felt modern. “Being inspired by music that’s already so classic – alternative rock from the 1980s and 1990s – that music is already so cemented in what it is, whereas trying to pull newer sounds is a scarier thing, because they’re not lodged in the ground, not lodged in the world yet. They haven’t been tried and tested as being good yet. It kind of creates a fear, and an excitement, because you feel like you’re going out into the unknown a little bit more.”
Coll says that every time they make an album it feels a million miles from their previous work, “but I think this one is probably the biggest step away”. He’s enjoying people “freaking out” about its sound and production. He played drums on the Kneecap album Fine Art, which “definitely set me off on a hip-hop vibe”. He found himself trying to emulate drum-machine-style patterns while also immersing himself in hardcore, 1990s grunge and Zamrock. He was particularly drawn to the hybrid, electronic-and-acoustic live drum set-up of Nine Inch Nails.
Fontaines DC have a new look for Romance. Curley says the album cover “sums up the feeling of the record: the slickness of futurism, and the caustic nature of futurism that takes humanity away from us, that scares us – but we’re still gung-ho and putting the foot down into the new reality”.
As the band continue to grow creatively, and loom large in contemporary culture, one challenge is to stay grounded. “Even as I’m saying this, I feel a kind of thing of ‘You’re talking about yourself too much,’” says Chatten, who says he tries to resist feeling too successful. “I think maybe I can walk off stage after playing in front of so many people and delete it from my memory in a way.” It’s harder when, say, he spots someone secretly filming him on a train. Then he feels the world rushing in, and is faced with the reality that he no longer has as much privacy or anonymity as he might like. He’s trying to get better at dealing with it.
So let’s go back to the strum that opens In the Modern World. At first it’s a simple, attractive entry point. Gradually, though, you notice a subtle acoustic layer under the electric one. Or is it the noise of strings being hit just before the pickup amplifies them? The sound dissolves, then re-emerges as a soft, acoustic-electric duet. The subtext is unlocked. Romance – the album, the concept, the intention – exists in this space between idea and reality, the decision to create and its outcome, the desire to birth something new and its execution, the feeling and its expression.
“I would probably say that, for most people, the first few listens of this record, it’ll feel like you’re given all the parts but it’s not really put into place yet,” Curley says. “But I think that’s some of the best records. Hopefully people will make sense of this one.”
“Maybe romance is a place,” Chatten sings on the title track. This is not a non-committal poem but a mode of creative inquiry that’s sending the band into uncharted space. Perhaps only in an untethering can liberation begin to be discovered.
Romance is released on Friday, August 23rd
