Fontaines D.C. Learn, Rise and Return

There’s a moment in an antsy, overheated crowd waiting for Fontaines D.C.’s one-off performance in the former Polish National Home in North Brooklyn on a May night where a small chorus of voices breaks the temperature and everyone’s backs straighten. As we shift from foot to foot for the millionth time in the last hour or so, Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy” starts playing over Warsaw’s PA system. I feel my lips almost unconsciously start to move with its hushed opening verse. As the song begins to build in the second verse, my jaw opens wider, my chin lifts and my voice gets louder to sing “I swear I didn’t mean those things I said” along with her. The movement forces me to look up to watch a few people around me, mostly older women, drop their jaws to sing that first line of a voice raised too—crying out for Sinéad’s Dublin drowning in rain while we melt in the grimy onset of a New York summer. Shared home city between the artist we heard and the band we were about to hear aside, I had a feeling it would be the last song to play before Fontaines D.C. finally took the stage.

Maybe I had that feeling because I’d heard frontman Grian Chatten speak about “Troy” before. Just last year, he deemed the track “the most inspiring kind of art that you can surround yourself with.” Still, that night I heard “Troy” and thought about Romance, the band’s then-recently-announced fourth album Romance, and how the two artists in question handle that title phrase. There is so much O’Connor understood before the rest of us did and was ballsy enough to say in real time. Even if you just focus on the songwriting, she knew that in our current world—often a terrifying, bloodless place—there are no more pure love songs and no true expressions of despair. There is now only art that captures us in flux, ricocheting between the two chaotic states.

True to my prediction, once Sinéad O’Connor’s voice crescendos halfway through the song and fades, the lights dim for the opening notes of “Romance,” the record’s title track and effective prelude, propped up over a lumbering, ominous guitar line and its tinny toy piano counterpart. As soon as the song thunders to a close, guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley, bassist Conor Deegan III, drummer Tom Coll and Chatten finally arrive, opening with “Nabakov,” the closer from 2022’s Skinty Fia. Two new songs slot perfectly against raucous favorites from the band’s 2019 debut Dogrel, and once a pit opens up in the center of the crowd, everyone moves—either to dance or to migrate towards the ornate walls on either side of the hall to avoid getting jostled.

Amid the restless crowd, a girl I don’t know standing behind me has her hand clawing at the very top of my spine, trying to keep her balance. “Life ain’t always empty,” she shrieks directly into my ear along with the band as they launch into the title track of 2020’s A Hero’s Death, the hand on my back now feeling more like an offering of rhapsodic physical reassurance than a safety precaution, “Life ain’t always empty.”

Two days earlier, a much calmer Grian Chatten and I sit on the terraced patio in front of the band’s hotel, a short walk from the venue in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. It’s one of the first noticeably warm days of the year, long before the seemingly never-ending heatwave the city finds itself in come August, when Romance will finally be released. Chatten is wearing the same silver wraparound sunglasses he will also don on the following night’s Tonight Show performance and at the Warsaw show the night after that. As we reach the end of our allotted interview time, I jokingly ask if I get an extra few minutes to speak with him, as he walked in for our time slot a few minutes late, but he stops me with a warm “Yeah, go for it,” before looking at me sheepishly. “Walking in late with my fucking L.A. shades and iced coffee…” he mutters, as if to scold himself, looking back down at the still-full beverage in question.

Even for their relatively casual press day, the band are decked out in the flashy, ‘90s-inspired duds which have demarcated the beginning of a new band era in performances and pictures and turned fans’ heads in the process. Carlos O’Connell is the first to meet me in the hotel lobby earlier that afternoon, walking down in search of coffee wearing baggy, black lace pants and with his dyed pink hair twisted to frame his face. Where he holds the crowd’s rapture with the swing of his arm on a stage, the professionals with espressos intently tapping at laptops around us don’t even flinch, having no interest in rock stars—which Fontaines D.C surely are at this point, if the term can still be used. It’s difficult to think of more than a handful of guitar bands who have ascended to similar heights in the last decade or so, marking them as an anomaly—a fact which they seem acutely aware of.

The thing is, the transformation—whether sartorial or musical—feels earned. When the band first emerged in an incessant wave of post-punk bands from the other side of the Atlantic, they were fairly easy to lump in with their fellow critically-acclaimed peers if you were just skimming the surface of what they presented. Yet, with each subsequent release, it felt increasingly reductive to call the band “guitar music.” Where those who would once be considered contemporaries may have struggled to evolve, few things have struck me in my time writing about music like hearing and dissecting the run of Skinty Fia singles in real time as they arrived, when the weighty, atmospheric crush of those songs wiped any reservations I still held clean off the map. There are plenty of bands nowadays, but fewer and fewer bands successfully make the jump to building an entire new world around you with each release. With Romance, Fontaines D.C. make it sound effortless.

O’Connell argues that, to a certain extent, the process has to be effortless to work at all. “I think if you anticipate creativity, you’re going against it,” he says of the album’s origins once we’ve settled on the opposite side of the patio. “The most important part is making sure that you’re constantly listening, open. If you do that, then you continue to evolve, just because you’re allowing yourself to be malleable rather than set on something. Some people live like that because it gives them a sense of safety, maybe. It’d give me a sense of despair, living like that.” He remains straight-faced and speaks evenly, almost meditative, as he leans back in his chair: “I think creativity must be unhinged.”

“Every six months, we’ll almost always have a collection of songs that could be made into an album, but it’s about whether or not there’s a heart to it—like a theme, or something that ties the whole thing together and makes it feel tangibly like one beast,” Chatten notes of Romance’s writing and recording period following the band’s stateside tour opening for Arctic Monkeys last fall. “The idea of Romance as a title was exciting to me, because it evokes the idea of a place. That was an interesting way to ground the writing process: to kind of deck the walls of this place, Romance, with these songs.”

Maybe because Skinty Fia dealt with the heft of physical location (specifically the band’s relationship with Ireland as they collectively migrated to London), Romance, by comparison, feels ephemeral—airy in even its darkest crevices, resulting in what is easily the most lush, expansive work Fontaines D.C. have produced to date. Coming to grips with what Robert Smith called “living at the edge of the world,” Romance speaks in apocalyptic terms, choosing panic as the first emotion it aims to weaponize.

That urge to covet as the earth beneath you crumbles apart comes most clearly in the breathless demands of lead single “Starburster,” whose rhythmic pant to “see you alone, alone, alone” finds the band trying to outrun the end by means of vacuum-sealing all they love off from harm. It comes with the betrayal recounted in the cadence of “Shit, shit, shit, battered / I caved in, my promise was clattered,” which Chatten spits over the Pixies-esque viscera of the record’s penultimate track, “Death Kink.” There’s denial in that audible sense of panic too, but in terms of songcraft and arrangement, it all feels like Fontaines shedding a protective layer and shoving their way into the future. They’re selective about when their edges sharpen and dull, allowing for nuance rather than a steadfast, thudding beat.

It’s when that proverbial tempo slowed that the heart of Romance started to emerge. The concept finally clicked when Chatten wrote “In the Modern World,” the album’s panoramic final single, which he describes as the story of “a fleeting romance at the end of the world” in his flat. “That, for me, felt like some kind of centerpiece,” he says. “It made me understand everything else that we’d been fucking around with through an interesting lens. The more industrial or futuristic the writing and production became, the more I wanted to base it in this kind of Hollywood glamor with the sheen of ‘Romance’ or ‘In the Modern World.’ It’s something that you’re trying to cling onto, because it represents the last crumbs of humanity as it disappears into this dystopian, robotic nightmare. All ethics and all morality and all human connection kind of falls to waste, you know?”

That precarious vision of humankind’s collapse is its own form of panic, but “In the Modern World” still stands as the eye of Romance’s storm, delivered in the form of girl group call-and-response and sinister rockabilly guitar over sweeping strings—begging desperately for connection as redemption, to not “feel bad” so as not to go numb. The facade crumbles from the word go, the surrounding songs’ unnatural neon glow seeping through the cracks, leaving even Romance’s picturesque center to be swallowed up by its own darkness: “As long as I’ve known, there’s no feeling to draw / You may be the reason, but I am the law.” It’s the most beautiful thing the band have done up to this point, flashing and retreating as quickly as it arrived.

Nevertheless, it provided a cinematic midpoint for the band to work outward from. “There was a moment where I called Carlos from the Thames in London,” Chatten continues, “And I just said, ‘It’s happening, isn’t it?’ Something kind of shifted.” O’Connell agrees: “We never fully conceptualize [ahead of time]. The core feeling gets exposed by conversations and songs. Then, you’re able to identify them, but it’s always from individual songs that things get built.”

In that sense, where the record can be understood as a stitched-together collection of vignettes, the songs almost operate like stages of grief—reacting and emoting in disparate directions that maintain a sense of cohesion in their desire to feel anything. “I think there’s something interesting about trying to grasp a feeling,” Chatten says, “and maybe in the songs, you can kind of feel it slip out of your hands a little bit. For example, the song ‘Favourite,’ I think, is searching for something. But lyrically, the fingers are spread open, the sand is falling through. So, there’s a kind of untrustworthy narrator in a lot of it.”

On the path to “Favourite”’s sun-drenched surrender, then, is the conflict that arises in those different stages, revealing the beauty and the bruising each option leaves behind. A track like the slow-burning “Desire” maps out the yearning for distraction until its become an obsessive sickness, insistent that “it’s high to be wanted, but haunted is higher and the change requires desire,” over nervous flutters of strings and near-monastic chants rumbling under the lead vocal. There’s resignation in the dizzying, almost psychedelic swirl of “Motorcycle Boy,” seeming to shrug off the person the same voice clung so tightly to in more urgent tracks: “It’s fine, I know / You rain, I snow / You stay, I go.” It’s simple and oblique, set up as if to directly counter the shadowy combativeness of previous track “Bug,” which wrings its hands over being “higher than anyone here” on top of a fleet of breezy acoustic guitars.

For all the narrative worldbuilding the lyrics do, it’s difficult to overstate how heavily Romance relies on its sound. It’s layered and intricate, but not fussy, letting each given sound serve as a unique voice just as Chatten’s does. This is, according to the band, in no small part due to the efforts of producer James Ford, known for his past work with the likes of tourmates Arctic Monkeys, Blur, shame, Jessie Ware and Florence + the Machine. Chatten recalls Ford staying behind for hours after the band would wrap up their sessions, mixing on the go late into the night to build out the apocalyptic soundscape that the material already demanded. (“He also just laughs for so long,” remembers Chatten, “which we all like. He could take a slagging.”) The results bend the dimensions of what a Fontaines D.C. song can be four albums and many more years deep, reappropriating textures that may scrape against each other in theory—like how the post-industrial brashness of “Starburster” stumbles straight into the grunge-aping “Here’s the Thing” in the running order—but complement each other in how they expand upon and stretch what already exists in the text.

In O’Connell’s estimation, the band’s switch in labels to XL—the home of so much groundbreaking alternative music over the past 35 years—also gave them the confidence to test the limits of what they could create as a unit. “I’m happy that [the album] exists, because I feel like I’m very bored with what guitar music has become,” he says, though he doesn’t mention anyone by name. “It feels like it’s become more careerist, like everything has to become a product. I find it hard to think of a band in the last while that doesn’t feel like a product of cultural interest. I don’t think any of our albums have felt like that—to me, anyway—but this one for sure feels even further away from that.”

Chatten seconds that it feels like the biggest leap they’ve taken thus far, even from the inside. “The deeper, more guttural, vague awareness of what the whole song is supposed to feel like is becoming stronger,” he confirms. “I think that’s why the songs, to me, feel a little bit more like set pieces than they used to. We’re also becoming aware of what we’re good at. I sing a lot more on this record than I used to, and I think that’s because I’m just learning to like my own voice for the first time. The solo record probably did a lot for that.”

His solo record in question, last year’s Chaos For the Fly, is interesting to refer back to in the context of the Fontaines D.C. album that follows it on a few levels. Where Romance certainly fumbles for answers when faced with a bleak end, the prior record stewed in a more potent form of isolation and the anger that it spawns—whether it’s through a character, like the alcoholic gambler on “Bob’s Casino,” or through a first-person missive on the bitter, stark “All of the People.” Here, collaborating with his bandmates, Chatten’s voice is able to project all the wistfulness and fear and depth the work requires, leaning fully into the musicality it’s developed over time.

Strangely, it’s a song where O’Connell wrote the lyrics, “Horseness is the Whatness,” which Chatten’s voice shines most clearly on. “Will someone find out what the word is that makes the world go round?” he sings, reaching the track’s climax over lapping waves of strings and steady percussion mimicking the sound of a heartbeat heard at the beginning, “‘cause I thought it was ‘love,’ but some say that it has to be ‘choice.’” After listening to the preceding album play out every possible reaction to a dire scenario, you can’t help but think of it in that context: pushing back on the end of the world is futile, but you choose the noise you make when you go. There are no pure love songs anymore, only attempts to crystalize in song everything that made us feel when numbness is so easy to choose. There are still things worth singing for, but they’re markedly more difficult to pin down.

Grian Chatten smiles when I ask how much of his voice in his own songwriting is a character or trying to put across an imagined experience. “I think I write better when I am convinced that it’s a character,” he says with no hesitation. “Were I to think ‘I’m gonna write a song about how I feel’—which I have done a couple of times, mostly on the solo record—I’d be stunted, because I have to actually come to terms with my own truth in that way. I guess the truth is easier if I pretend I’m someone else.” Long after I’ve spoken to Fontaines D.C., I find myself thinking a lot about how much of romance, as a concept, is rooted in hope, even when it’s based in nothing but that. For all of its outright denial and frenzied panic—its insistence on mourning or exploding or both in the most colorful, grandiose fashion—Romance, the album, is about hope as well.

“Any form of creativity that gives you something more is beautiful,” O’Connell affirms, “and I find it really sad when that’s hijacked to create capital gains. You want to see more humans experience more, have more to give than the goals they’re told they have to reach.” He thinks about the band’s connection with those who are coming to shows and interacting, trekking out to festivals, making a concerted effort to buy the album. “Ultimately, it’s a two-way thing [between the band and the fans]. I probably get more pleasure from listening to music than I do from making it. It just so happens that I make music as well, but where I truly get real joy—what fills most of my days—is listening to other music. The goal is to make sure that both those sides can continue.”

Chatten also thinks about the people who have attached themselves so fervently to Fontaines D.C. over the past five years, wondering all the while if it’s unlocked something new in their creative process, like feedback echoing into whatever they put out next. “I think I’m becoming more comfortable expressing myself in a universal manner,” he says. “I think allowing a little bit of that…not necessarily concern about what other people are going to think, but writing songs with a flashing image of a crowd is a newly interesting thing for me. [The songwriting process is] not just necessarily, like, me with all the fucking lights off with a candle in my bedroom, d’you know what I mean? Now, I think I have more longevity, more scope, maybe more patience.”

Maybe it’s simply a matter of sticking it out and keeping an eye on the bigger creative picture that has allowed Fontaines D.C. to reinvent themselves and widen the scope of the work successfully each time, I suggest. Chatten considers this. “Maybe it’s also trusting that this part,” he gestures to the “color” of an audience, like the sold-out one he’ll greet at Warsaw in two days’ time, “is taken care of, trusting that the chops are there on a creative level. Then, maybe I’m able to lend a bit more of my subconscious to…” He stops himself abruptly, the pensive look on his face behind the silver sunglasses straining the second he seems to process what he wants to say. “Oh,” he rolls his eyes at himself, looking down at the table like he’s about to break into another self-aware half-smile, “I sound like such an asshole.”

But Chatten is wrong there, because there is something to the way crowds of New Yorkers will react to a song written in a shed in Dublin years ago, screaming back “Too Real”’s opening salvo of “None can pull the passion loose from youth’s ungrateful hands” and its tongue-in-cheek kicker, “As it stands, I’m about to make a lot of money,” like it’s the written expression of all they’ve lived and worked at and know. There’s something to the way fans mimic the strangled gasps of “Starburster” with the same level of enthusiasm, huddling closer together in a packed hall to the point where they move and breathe as one beast with no space to think or fresh air to hold—only the thrill of physicality they can express as the song erupts.

This is the crowd that will listen to Sinéad O’Connor’s voice wail and fade, giving way to the first time a room of gathered people will hear “God knows I love you, screws in my head” played over a booming PA as shoulders collide and soles strain. They’ll remember who they brushed against when the band introduces “Favourite” and they’re the first to hear Grian Chatten sing “But if there was lightning in me / Then you know who it was for” live, only for them to listen again and repeat the line a thousand times over when they stand in a different room alone. In its overwhelming neon glow, that something takes a handful of lines written in an apartment and forges them into a love song to the new world—swinging between electric extremes and knocking the wind out of every spectator in its path as it repeats the trick. That’s the feeling of a hand clawing at the top of your spine in an act of love, the tilt of your chin that forces your voice out and forward. But for now, the lights come up, backs straighten and the floor gives way.

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Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.