Devotion permeates the veins of Fontaines DC’s music. The Dublin group first burst onto the post-punk scene with their debut in 2019 Dogrela nuanced, gripping homage to their homeland; 2022’s gutturale Thin Fia have opened up about the guilt they felt after moving to London. Now they’re looking at devotion from a whole new perspective, which is featured in the opening title track of their fourth album. romance. Over brooding, cinematic synthesizer sounds, singer Grian Chatten proclaims: “Maybe romance is a place/For me/And you.”
If it took anything from the 4 singles that preceded the songs the band released before, romancethat Fontaines cannot be pigeonholed. From the grungy 90s rap-rock flow of “Starburster” (one of the best tracks of the year) to the jangly dream-pop charm of “Favourite”, the band quickly dissolved all genre boundaries that had previously been imposed on them. The change was exciting, it was unpredictable, it was even slightly nerve-racking. But romance delivers on its promises: the record is incredibly comprehensive and Fontaines’ stubborn integrity is still there, perhaps even with a stronger backbone than ever before.
The subversion goes beyond the music: a major talking point around the album’s release was the band’s sudden aesthetic and stylistic shift. The colors are brighter, the outfit choices more bizarre. That might seem drastic, but this isn’t a band trying to reinvent the wheel; it’s a group that has reached a new level of confidence. And that’s not entirely accidental, after all; there have been hints that this version of Fontaines has always lived in their DNA. In a Reddit AMA the band did five years ago in support of DogrelFrontman Chatten expressed his love for a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, also titled “Romance,” saying it “seems to me similar to some of (Bob) Dylan’s early lyrics.”
It takes a real romantic to create worlds, and Fontaines DC have mastered this art. Every song on romance functions as its own fantastical cinematic universe, fleshed out with fictional characters, profound monologues and perfectly curated sound elements. This is partly thanks to the band’s decision to work with producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Blur) on this record. The textures of the instruments on romance The sound is clearer and more precise and shows drummer Tom Coll, bassist Conor (Deego) Deegan III and guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley in their most harmonious synchronicity.
On tracks like “Desire” and the stormy, Slowdive-esque “Sundowner” — which sees Curley take lead vocals — heart-wrenching guitar riffs build on a solid bed of lush strings and push into full-on shoegaze territory. “Death Kink” is a masterclass in edge and restraint, with Chatten gasping for air as a sky-high wave of fuzzy guitars pauses just long enough for him to say, “I made a promise and I rocked it/Shit, shit, shit.”
The band’s vocal performances serve as their own narrative tactic. Chatten outdoes himself, whether he’s using his raspy growl, floating into falsetto, or stepping back from the microphone to let his words echo and drop in negative space. A great strength of romance are the background voices of Deego and O’Connell – they double as interjections or secondary narrators, telling their own little stories. Take, for example, the back-and-forth conversation that takes place on the cascading, Lana Del Rey-esque “In The Modern World.” an orchestral exploration of numbness and escapism: “I don’t feel anything, and I don’t feel bad.”
At some moments on the record, particularly the string-laden ones, it feels like Fontaines DC are teetering on the edge of disillusionment. They are acutely aware of the crumbling dystopian world around them, and themes of apocalyptic existentialism and a real Hail Mary feeling of “love at the end of the world” run throughout the album. And yet they maintain that romance – however idealistic and whimsical the concept – is the whole point, an illusion worth indulging in.
The heartbeat of the album lies in “Horseness Is The Whatness”, The name goes back to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Chatten sings a lyric written by O’Connell and begs, dazed, for someone to figure out what word makes the world go round. “Because I thought it was love,” he pleads with almost childlike defiance, and you can tell he wants to believe it. “But some say it has to be a choice.”
The tension between love and choice is reminiscent of a song on the band’s 2020 album The death of a hero. The title is the message and is repeated in a loop throughout the track: “Love is the main thing.” romance Fontaine’s DC runs through a thick haze of fear and doom, raising a lot of questions about what the point of it all is. It seems like they always knew the answer.
