There’s no hiding what this album's about: the clue’s in the title. The fourth studio album from Irish post-punk (although we’ll get onto how appropriate this label is) outfit Fontaines D.C. is straightforwardly entitled Romance and, throughout my now-multiple listens, I found myself thinking ‘yeah, well, that makes sense’.
Fontaines’ lead singer, Grian Chatten has spoken at length about the influence that poetry has on the band’s output. Their first album, Dogrel, takes its name directly from the old poetic form of ‘doggerel’. Given that doggerel is poetry irregular in its rhythm and often for comedic effect, the irony shouldn’t exactly be overlooked. Whilst Chatten’s previous writing hasn’t exactly shied away from love, lust and longing, in Romance we are treated to eleven tracks focusing almost exclusively on the romantic. Figures. Yet what the band do with their sound and track placement take what could be traditional love songs and heartbreak ballads in lesser hands and drag them kicking and screaming into a new frontier of Gen Z’s now seemingly-eternal post-punk revival.
The opening, eponymous title track is a bold introduction to what Fontaines clearly wanted this album to be. It is a swarming, swelling march into the album itself, reminiscent of a villainous film refrain, a Bond track or Arctic Monkeys’ recent Sculptures of Anything Goes. A song like this can sometimes fall into the trap of not allowing itself to reach its natural conclusion, but Romance the song ebbs into a thrilling crescendo as Chatten ponders ‘Maybe romance is a place/for me and you’ in his iconic Irish brogue. Thinking about romance as a destination, or more a central hub, helps the listener through the rest of the album.
Fontaines D.C. headline Glastonbury's Park Stage.
We then nova straight into the album’s lead single, Starburster, which departs from the moodiness of the opener and straight into the most traditional rock song on offer here (which says a lot because it really is not traditional at all). It’s clear why Starburster was chosen as the lead single – it’s the catchiest, highest-energy, most digestible song from the album – and yet they manage to stray away from any of the monotony that can be fallen into with leading heavy guitar sound. Compared to the now-actual traditional rock numbers on their earlier albums, Starburster is a refreshingly complex sound in the rock scene. The band have talked about the inspiration that nu-metal had on this one, with Chatten talking about his fear of nu-metal icons Korn as a child, and that is unmistakable here. The rap-rock delivered lyrics are obviously reminiscent of the early 2000s, and yet the themes themselves are unmistakably 2020s. Chatten opposes the overall idea of romance with that of hedonism here, the main refrain saying ‘I’m gonna hit your business if it’s momentary blissness’, contrasted with the backing vocals of ‘It may feel bad’. With the late-millennial hedonistic revival confronting the younger generation’s sex-negativity in corners of the Internet these days, starting an album about romance with the constant desire for ‘momentary blissness’ is a clear statement of the frustration of modernity come 2024. And yet, those backing vocals ensure that the track is not uncritical of its own hedonistic message; the knowledge that the aforementioned 'momentary blissness' more often than not results in some regrettable feelings is something we are all much too aware of. If anything, the necessity of hedonism is partaking in bodily pleasures knowing the risk involved. It is this complexity which enamoured me with this album. More on this when we get a few other tracks in, though. Finally, I didn’t want to pass Starburster without pointing out that it’s maybe Chatten’s most ‘something to sing’ song at points, however, with ‘I’m the pig on the Chinese calendar’ and ‘I wanna move like a new Salamander’ taking the trophy for favourite lyrics on the entire album.
The next two songs, Here’s the Thing and Desire are where the concept of romance really start to come to the fore; and yet, they couldn’t be more different to each other. The former is a guitar-heavy smashmouth that drags through the noise of Starburster, whilst the latter is a strings-lead ballad that allows the album’s main themes to be heard. The sound on Here’s the Thing has a Shoegaze quality that really allows it to stand out – and whilst Fontaines’ lyrics are notoriously difficult to hear on a first try, Chatten’s voice is far too distinctive to fall into actual Shoegaze – yet it feels like the song ends just as we’re getting to the moment where it could really kick into a higher gear. Instead of leaving me wanting more, I’m left feeling a touch flat after what is a ridiculously energetic song. This lower-key is then matched by Desire, a winding ballad in which the concept of longing is really introduced for the first time. The song’s ending refrain of ‘All 24 retching with desire’ as the sound has built to a cacophony can overwhelm the listener if unready (something I learnt the hard way). Some bands fail to have their sound match the emotion of what their song is saying but Fontaines proved here that, even in changing their sound a touch, the ability to communicate what they’re trying to say is not lost.
After this we move into the track that, for me, ties together everything this album is about: In the Modern World. It’s an acoustic song transplanted onto the electronic and matched by Chatten’s crooning, resulting in something Lana Del Rey would be proud of. It’s the main refrain of ‘In the modern world/I don’t feel anything/I don’t feel bad’ that I want to draw attention to. In between the highs of being so in love you would die for it and being so full of longing you feel sick is what the rest of it brings: nothing. Rattling from such intense emotion to a nihilistic emptiness allows In the Modern World to stand out on an album full of worthwhile songs. Such a critique of modernity - that there are points when you can feel so much and then be so alienated by the tremors of the modern - will no doubt resonate with Chatten’s contemporaries. Sick of city life, sick of capitalist realism helplessness, sick of feeling so much that you come around to feel nothing at all. The song allows Starburster to take on a new dimesion also, giving the hedonistic symbolism of hitting someone up for ‘momentary blissness’ an existential importance – if you don’t feel anything, if nothing matters, then what you choose to feel becomes essential. It is a rallying cry against its own self. The alienation that is trending across the current generation, within this specific stage of the capitalist superstructure, is something we need to define, not let define us. See the advantages in not feeling anything and not feeling bad. I recently came across a quote from James Baldwin in which he writes, ‘You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone’. I think Romance is able to tap into this for contemporaries of Fontaines D.C.. It is rare to find a band that can aptly sum up the feeling of a generation and I think it’s essential to recognise it when it comes along.
The boys from the better land.
It was, I’ll admit, a bit difficult to get myself back into it after the catharsis of In the Modern World. Track six, Bug, rounds off the first half with an incredibly catchy acoustic rock offering detailing the emotions of a married adulterer, but this is where the album hits its slower beats. Motorcycle Boy, Sundowner and Horseness is the Whatness are by no means bad songs, but against the triumph that is the opening half they can unfortunately feel like filler. There’s an ability for slower, string-filled tracks to feel much of a muchness, despite what they add to the emotional resonance of the album.
It's the last two songs, though, in which the album kicks back into life. Death Kink is a grunge-y offering whose opening wouldn’t be out of place on Nirvana’s In Utero, yet drags itself through into a much more contemporary sound as the band have repetitively proved their ability to do. The strained emotion in Chatten’s voice matches the winding looseness of the electric guitar sounds to jolt the entire album back into gear and, in true Nirvana fashion, is a song where the sound itself matters a lot more than what is actually being said. Death Kink is one to just sit back and enjoy.
It is then rounded off by the second single off the album, Favourite. I think it was an inspired choice to put Favourite last. It is the most obvious love song on the entire album, accurately surmising the bittersweetness of heartbreak. For an album in which the concept is written into the title, returning back to its most obvious meaning to bring it to a close allows the listener to remember that it doesn’t have to all be a doomed philosophy: sometimes it’s okay to just be a bit heartbroken. The refrain of ‘You were my favourite for a long time’ is an everlasting concept for anyone who has ever felt any level of romance in their entire lives. If you’re going to take anything away from this album, you should probably let it be ‘But if there was lightning in me/You’d know who it was for’.
I’m not going to be giving this album a star rating or a decimal place out of ten. You should be able to tell that I like it a lot. I don’t even think what's important in this piece is whether I came away liking it – what I’d implore you to take away is the ability of an artist to synthesise the feeling of a moment. Fontaines D.C., despite headlining Glastonbury’s Park Stage a couple of months back, are still a band on the up. Four albums in, they’ve managed to take melodic, poetry-inspired lyrics and deliver them in fresh ways. It’s difficult to just define the album in terms of post-punk – it is post-punk in a definition of being inspired by many of the sounds that came after punk, and yet is seemingly its own thing. Regardless, I think the incessantness of modernity is ripe for a new wave of cultural criticism to pass through music as it often has done before. If Punk was defined by its own black-and-white brashness, the critical music of the 2020s should be defined by its own oppressed positivity. Nihilism, hedonism, the existential – these don’t have to be bad things. Fontaines D.C. have isolated that idea and thrown some very good music back towards it. Let’s hope others do the same.
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Sam Mandi-Ghomi is a co-founder and co-editor of Left Brain Media. You can find his other work here.
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