It’s wild how far Fontaines D.C. have come in just five years: from a debut album released in a time when music publications were declaring indie rock dead, to selling out massive venues and being plastered on billboards all across town. It would be preposterous to claim that their success is easily explicable – there’s many factors, from the onset of the lockdown pushing Zoomers to be more adventurous in their musical excavations to a resurgent nostalgia for rock music… and of course the sheer quality of the Dublin five-piece’s writing.
Their last album Skinty Fia was, in this regard, an incredible leap forward: an album that many of the BPM staff now argue should have made our top 50 list of 2022, it was a poignant piece of social realism, exploring the Irish mindset in sparkling melancholy. A little The Smiths, some Josef K, but genuinely charismatic and packed with personality and great lyricism. I’m sure the case could be made that it was one of the key records in re-establishing “indie” with the current generation of teenagers.
Romance, their fourth album, is the clear consequence of that massive success, a blockbuster release that is packed with cinematic pop songs. Colourful and experimental, it uses the ego of peak Britpop-era releases to craft an expensive sounding monolith. It’s their Everything Must Go, all melodrama and arena gestures, orchestras and climaxes. The influences are at times strange, weirdly incoherent in an intriguing way and interconnect with an era in alternative rock when musicians made so much music they could afford to make something entirely brazen.
Want a cross of Eartheater’s lush melancholia with Deftones’ heavy post-shoegaze rock? Dive into “Sundowner”, a bizarre but beautiful ballad that sounds of forgotten nu-metal balladry. You seek a Lana Del Rey-style pop song in the vein of Born to Die? Give “In the Modern World” a shot, which replicates the megastar’s writing style down to minute detail. A Kasabian style banger to drink and dance to? Go for lead single “Starburster”, which is an utter marvel at energy and attitude. What about a Nirvana track, a la “Lithium” or “Rape Me”? Well, “Death Kink” has you covered, delivering a precise replica of late-era grunge instrumental, clattering solo and all, while also poignantly observing a toxic, abusive relationship. And closer “Favourite” has a shade of New Order’s less electronic work to it, jangling joyfully.
Yet behind all the glitz and glam, Romance is most of all strangely… sad. Yes, maybe that’s to be expected from a record that features a teary CGI heart on its sleeve, but the record does mostly deliver ballads and melancholic moments. Opener “Romance” conjures an arena-sized image of heartbreak that sounds like the dark entrance of an action movie’s villain – both with its booming sonics, but also self-vilifying lyrics. “Starburster” has a similarly aggressive energy (maybe due to vocalist Grian Chatten rewriting the lyrics at the last moment), all braggadocios rap persona that antagonises for fun. There’s not just a pinch of self hatred here – both songs react to abandonment with aggression.
“Desire”, meanwhile, is a string-led rock ballad that focuses on the predetermination of mental illness and loneliness: “Deep they’ve designed / You from cradle to pyre / In the mortal attire / Desire”. Here, Chatten reconnects with his social observations of Skinty Fia, but aims for more surreal imagery: “I see them driving into nothing where the nothing is sure / They drown their wishes in the fountain like their fathers before / And in the park the firefighters turned their bodies to glass / Some people seem to take their time when they pass”. “Bug” explores a troubled, drug-fuelled relationship in the folk-influenced tone of The Church’s “Under the Milky Way” rock, with one of the most memorable refrains on the album: “In the charmless morning / I promise to be gone / I almost felt the feeling / That I wanted to, I wanted to, yeah”.
“Motorcycle Boy” uses the imagery of Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish – and the aura of Billy Corgan’s “Disarm” – for Chatten to connect with his younger brother: a warning, but also an expression of love. It’s also more proof of how talented Chatten has become in poetry, using minimal language to express deeply poignant emotions: “It’s finе / I know / You rain / I snow / You stay / I go”. “Horseness is the Whatness” is equally gentle, but leaning into a more resigned tone, referencing Joyce’s Ulysses and expressing political fatigue through depression: “Will someone / Find out what the word is / That makes the world go round? / ‘Cause I thought it was ‘love’ / But some say / That it has to be ‘choice’ / I read it in some book / Or an old packet of smokes”.
Even if “Favourite” closes out the album on an optimistic note, finding a bouncy melody over Chatten’s observations on ageing, returning to an old love in the ol’ small town, there’s an undeniable darkness and elegiac weight throughout Romance. This makes it somewhat harder to assess than Skinty Fia. That album was angry, driven by Chatten addressing collective Irish trauma that is meant to be unsaid – kitchen sink drama, but from the mouth of a frustrated child who finally scolds his inner circle by holding a mirror up to their faces. Romance chooses quieter words, leaving out details, as their omission rings more powerful. It even chooses to pass on the microphone at times to allow other narrators in: the shoegaze inspired “Sundowner” is written and sung by guitarist Conor Curley, which adds to its surreal quality.
And still, the album is an undeniable selection of bangers – even when they come in the form of slow balladry. It’s the type of stuff that has music editors and journalists scratch their heads at what track to put on a playlist, yet will have its core audience sing along and freak out to each individual song at a live show. And that’s very commendable: there’s not many albums like Romance around nowadays, which attempt to craft an intentionally big album – the way that, say, Beggars Banquet was an intentionally big album, even though it was mostly comprised of barebones blues tracks.
Pathos is usually looked down upon by the gatekeepers of music journalism if it isn’t caked in nostalgia, but it’s undeniably, intoxicatingly cleverly how Fontaines D.C. express that ambition. Somehow, they continue to outrun all expectations, without losing their integrity or focus. That’s truly remarkable in indie rock, a genre often marked by a lack of divergences and brevity. In that light, what matters most is that this record means more to a generation of teenagers who will see it as the soundtrack to their adolescence – with all its dramas and dead ends – than to an elite of older writers who compare it to whatever is in the rearview mirror. It’s great, urgent music. Sad and enticing.
