A gothic ESCAPE full of life and wonderment as the Irish boys play with their newfound fame.
Maybe romance is a place
OVERVIEW
A brooding, brazen band with a drizzle of dark, Fontaines DC have always embedded their Irish identity deep into the heart of their music. A statement which has never been more true when we saw the arrival of Skinty Fia in 2022, projecting an idle deer out of pocket and out of place. As the album began to settle and their steely post-punk became a larger household name amongst fans, the band went dark.
Before the going got too much, they had time apart to build more singular visions for what future music could be: O’Connell went into fatherhood, Deegan ventured to Paris while Chatten spent time in LA which what transpired to be his glaring debut as a soloist. Chaos For The Fly was a floating thought bubble of introspection for the frontman and it worked, (you can hear a lot of this trickled throughout Romance, in fact). Boundaries were pushed -hodge-podge experimental riffs, lyrical transgressions – without any intentions of a record, mind.
Before too long however, they were together unfurling these deeper roots of exploration as they began to piece together their fourth record Romance: knowing full well that it had to be far bolder, and far more ambitious than anything before.
As Skinty Fia bid farewell to the bands’ Dublin origins, Romance is very much an embrace to the globe-trotting rockstars we see before us. With a new perspective comes a change in something to reflect about. The raw post-punk, political pints and poetry of Dogrel and A Hero’s Death all seem too youthful now stacked against the steed of Romance – a blistering tsunami of gothic ’90s alt rock and ’80s swoon made up with stalling synths and soaring strings. It’s an album immersed in a distilled darkness that is very much in its own lane.
[Using Taiwanese artist Lulu Lin‘s work across the album campaign, the album finds itself embellished amongst such a craze for a band, where we saw the likes of Harry Styles, Florence Welch and Cillian Murphy enjoying the spoils of Romance at an intimate Camden gig last night. ]
SONG-TO-SONG
Both the opener title track and Starbuster are emphatically harrowing in their own right. Dissonant piano trills and brooding fuzz guitar make up a lot of its mark-up; fulled by an ever-present and ever-vibrant Grian, with his jittery breathing markers throughout the record. There is a pleading ache in Here’s the Thing that is unmatched, “so here’s the thing, I know you’re watching, I feel your pain, It’s mine aswell.” Their sonic ambitious initiate take-off with Desire, In the Modern World and Horseness Is the Whatness meanwhile, is a triage of whimsical beauty and stadium-sized echoings that truly do tap into that ’90s alternative world of Smashing Pumpkins / Pixies. They’re quite possibly some of the most beautiful songs crafted in the bands’ catalogue – and that’s Roy’s Tune in the mix. Death Kink is the brazen unpredictability of a band still wading through the sounds anew. The album acclimatises once more to the feel-good Favourite – a gem amongst the clouds destined for cathartic roadtrip playlists and chippy tea on the beach despite the meagre meaning behind the song (it’s about death fyi). In true Fontaines D.C fashion of course, it’s poetic, sardonic and remarkably powerful. Grian commands in lyricism, “And you don’t feel it / It’s a cry far from bed radios / And days spent playing football indoors / When they painted town with Thatcher / And they never even wanted to know ya, Feel alone?”
As the band power on through the rumble strip of notoriety and consequence, Romance sees the band take a swerve to a more free-floating kind of gothic alternative. It’s not a misstep by any stretch, but rather – a giant stride forward to even more greatness destined for the Dublin boys.
manvmusic.com 
Leave a comment