Fontaines DC: Romance review – arenas await, but on the band’s own strange terms

Few debuts in recent years have boasted an opening quite as striking as Big, the first track on Fontaines DC’s 2019 album Dogrel. One minute and 45 seconds of frantic double-time drumming, churning guitar and vocals mixed high and without reverb – so that it felt as if frontman Grian Chatten was shouting the lyrics about six inches away from your face – it announced the Dublin quintet as by far the most strident and exciting of the late-2010s wave of bands offering up post-punk topped with sprechgesang vocals: “My childhood was small,” Chatten kept shouting, “but I’m gonna be big.”

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It was a song you could have interpreted in a number of ways – an exploration of the band’s clearly complex relationship with the confines of their home town; a satire of naked ambition and unattainable dreams – but it couldn’t help sounding as if the one thing Fontaines DC insisted it wasn’t: a statement of intent. In fairness, their subsequent career hardly suggested a band eager to please. In 2020, their second album, A Hero’s Death, prickled with distrust at the fame Dogrel had brought them; 2022’s Skinty Fia was murky, demanding and largely funereally paced, yet it still made No 1.

But, as if to underline that you never know quite what to expect from Fontaines DC, Skinty Fia’s follow-up makes you wonder if they have reconsidered Big’s statement of bullish ambition. You would hesitate to call it a sunnier album than its predecessor – the first words you hear are “into the darkness again”. But it’s certainly more brightly coloured, as indeed are Fontaines DC themselves these days. Their wilfully anonymous, dressed-down image has been traded in for dyed hair, kaleidoscopic clothes and sunglasses; bassist Conor Deegan and guitarist Carlos O’Connell could now pass for ancillary members of the Prodigy in their Firestarter pomp.

The sonic transformation isn’t quite as dramatic – you could draw a direct line between the churning shoegaze-y guitars of Sundowner and Skinty Fia’s closer Nabokov, and most of the songs on Romance that actually deal with romance seem as troubled and ambiguous in tone as Fontaines DC’s songs about Ireland. Yet it’s a transformation nonetheless. Their sound has expanded to encompass string-laden ballads (the James Joyce-inspired Horseness Is the Whatness and In the Modern World), the title track’s synthy, Faith-era Cure gloom and, on the entirely charming closer Favourite, pre-Madchester John Peel indie.

The band’s teenage love of nu-metal has also been stirred into the mix, although the latter is an influence worn pretty lightly: if they hadn’t mentioned Korn and Deftones in interviews, you would assume the vocal delivery of Starburster’s verses was derived directly from hip-hop. And, while the riff of Here’s the Thing could be ground out by a guitarist in big shorts and an oversized basketball vest, it’s less striking than the song’s octave-leaping melody. The latter aspect feels key: the most obvious musical shift on Romance is the decision to foreground a capacity for pop melody that’s lurked subtly since their debut album’s Television Screens, and which Chatten fully demonstrated on his folky 2023 solo album Chaos for the Fly.

The resulting album feels as if it’s powered by a constant push and pull between contrasting elements. Bursts of lush orchestration are scuffed up by Chatten’s raw, flinty voice, which is so distinctive that wherever the album ventures musically, it automatically sounds like Fontaines DC. Meanwhile, the sweetness of the tunes is tempered by the spikiness of the playing – even on the slowest tracks, the acoustic guitars sound as if they’re being absolutely pummelled – and by what Chatten is actually singing. The musical buoyancy of Favourite battles against lyrics that picture someone staggering along in the wake of a binge, paranoid, dislocated and “chewed into shape like a stone on the shore”.

As their noted Dublin influences Gilla Band often do, Starburster depicts a panic attack in surprisingly funny terms – a tumble of chaotic, disconnected thoughts that variously take in Dublin’s general post office, the GPO; Catholicism; the 2023 Sag-Aftra union actor’s strike; and JD Salinger – but its humour is regularly spiked by the unsettling sound of Chatten gulping for air in loud, distressed breaths.

Romance is more straightforwardly approachable than any Fontaines DC album to date – you can easily imagine Desire provoking an immense crowd into singing along. But it doesn’t sacrifice any of the band’s potency in the process: thrillingly, it still carries the same grimy, careworn, aggressive qualities as their previous work. There’s clearly currently an opening for an alternative guitar band to tip over into festival headlining, arena-packing territory. Romance definitely sounds like a band applying to fill said vacancy, but it’s no craven lunge for mass acceptance: it invites a bigger audience into Fontaines DC’s world, but it never begs them to accept. You suspect they’ll take up the offer regardless.

This week Alexis listened to

Salute – One of Those Nights (ft Empress Of)
Anyone in search of a fresh soundtrack for the dog days of summer should be directed towards Salute’s debut album True Magic: it features One of Those Nights, which mergess French house, soulful UKG and fidgety, pacy beats into an alluring whole.