On their fourth album, Romance, Fontaines D.C. try to re-locate what made them yearn and dream in the first place - they often come up with some very uncomfortable answers
"Into the darkness again . . . " sings Grian Chatten over prickling post-punk guitars and ominous percussion on the opening track of Fontaines D.C.'s fourth album. It’s a menacing intro to a record all about embracing the possibilities and the limitations of romance but this is also a record that sees the celebrated Irish five piece begin to sound like much, much more than the house band at the end of the world.
Often sounding like a slow-release panic attack, Romance is sonically curious. There is blunt post-punk aplenty but also foreboding orchestration, clanging sound effects, muted electronica, nu-metal and an empty warehouse of echoes and snatched vocals that add a sense of mystique to Fontaines’ boilerplate indie guitars and Chatten’s Ian Curtis 10,000-yard stare.
And just like the band’s first three albums, Romance chases down a unifying theme. Debut Dogrel lamented Dublin’s cultural, architectural (and every other way) decline; the Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death wrestled with existential detachment from their homeland; and 2022’s austere and abstract Skinty Fia seemed to reevaluate the Irish diaspora through the prism of some ancient Hibernia.
On Romance, the band sift through the embers of the past few years of No 1s, industry awards and almost universal acclaim to re-locate what made them yearn and dream in the first place when they formed in 2017 - and they often come up with some very uncomfortable answers.
Success certainly hasn’t spoilt post-rock hunter Grian Chatten. He’s as feral and unknowable as ever on Romance. On the terrific Starburster, a blunt instrument of a guitar song that lurches about like one of those crappy robot dogs, he gulps for air at the end of each sentence. Half Behan, half Joyce, his gift for bleak blank verse is intact - "chewed into shape like a stone on the shore", he sings on Favourite; "I wanna take the truth without a lens on it, My God-given insanity, it depends on it." (Starburster) and "will someone find the word is for what makes the world go round because I thought it was love." (Horseness is The Whatness).
There is so much to love here from a band who still project an aura of insolent insouciance. Desire is an atmospheric epic with brass and strings, while album standout In the Modern World has all the widescreen grandeur of an Elmer Bernstein score for a western. There are more pop swerves on the likes of Bug, which recalls The Smiths at their blithest and bitterest ("will you apologise for the remainder of your life?" is more Morrissey than Morrissey himself) and seems to recount a tale of doomed, well, romance. Sundowner, sung by guitarist Carlos O’Connell, is another stylistic departure that manages to locate the missing link between the blissful reveries of The Cocteau Twins and the vaporous shoegaze of Slowdive.
Sounding like a macabre nursery rhyme, Death Kink is another corrosive churn of guitar, with Chatten delivering some of his best mordant one-liners over a piledriver of a riff straight out of the Pixies songbook. But it’s on closing track Favourite where the new Fontaines come clean. Defences finally down, it’s a swooning love song by way of WB Yates and The Cure. Chatten, switching between flat Dublinese and a swooping falsetto, finally concedes that love wins out in the end, after all.
Nihilistic but romantic, poetic and tender, Fontaines may be coming out of the darkness again.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
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