Regardless of its resilient exterior, Fontaines D.C.’s music has all the time evoked a profound sense of soul-searching. Of their early days, the Dublin band expressed a perception that ambition was merely sufficient to transcend circumstance or humdrum environment. Their 2019 debut ‘Dogrel’ writhed by way of skittering guitar passages aplenty, bravura overflowing, the power typically messy and uncontained, however a quiet spirituality at its core – heard in a number of songs in regards to the weight of merely current – felt humid and pronounced.
Although the five-piece have continued to evolve their aesthetic album to album, this sense has prevailed of their work. Maybe nowhere, nonetheless, has frontman Grian Chatten’s songwriting felt extra arrestingly attuned to the thorny tangle of life than on fourth LP ‘Romance’, an album that charts the devastating duality of its title – primarily the best way a love or need so tender can morph into one thing near-debilitating.
Like a gale-force wind that swoops in and leaves you undone, the file opens with a blown-out epic within the type of its title monitor. Chatten sings of being on the mercy of his emotions, emphasised by a cymbal crash that feels akin to a complete give up to sensation. The Deftones-like ‘Right here’s The Factor’ is simply as splendidly uneasy, thick with unresolved feelings and squalling instrumentals.
The place predecessor ‘Skinty Fia’ was steadfast in speaking its central themes (from guilt and disillusionment to new beginnings), ‘Romance’ takes its time unravelling. Half glowing love tune, half troubled revelation, ‘In The Trendy World’ foregrounds dystopian imagery in opposition to a muted hallucinatory haze. A determined, self-lacerating urge to destroy is wrapped up in some futuristic sheen on ‘Starburster’: “I wanna take the reality and not using a lens on it / My God-given madness, it will depend on it,” Chatten spits breathlessly, as if he’s a single chord change away from melting down fully.
At this yr’s Glastonbury, the place Fontaines D.C. headlined the Park stage, Chatten rounded off their efficiency with a short shoutout to Danish local weather researcher and creator Nikolaj Schultz. It felt indicative of how ‘Romance’ is the band’s most thought-about and intricately crafted launch but, dotted with wide-ranging allusions to decay (a cascading ‘Sundowner’), apocalyptic visions and all of the ghosts who’ve handed by way of their lives (‘Dying Kink’). ‘Romance’ provides moments of marvel and gravity whereas additionally feeling often foreboding.
A lot of its energy, subsequently, comes from the best way the discomfiting temper is offset by the lusciousness of the melodies. “Ah, it is sensible whenever you perceive / The distress made me one other marked man,” Chatten sings in the direction of the top of nearer ‘Favorite’, a celebration of the previous and all its learnings. These ultimate, perfectly-chosen phrases will solely tackle a lifetime of their very own and reverberate onwards.
Particulars
- Document label: XL Recordings
- Launch date: August 23, 2024
