‘In the Modern World’, the latest single from Fontaines D.C.’s new album, marks new territory for the band. It was written in Los Angeles, where singer Grian Chatten also laid down parts of his debut solo album, 2023’s Chaos for the Fly. Other band members also spent time abroad during the making of the record: guitarist Carlos O’Connell in Spain’s Castile-La Mancha, bassist Conor Deegan in Paris. “The modern world” could invoke any number of places, but the song’s soul-sucking subject clearly alludes to those “parts of the west coast of America” that Chatten has said “feel like death to me.” Press materials describe its string-laced balladry as “indebted to Lana Del Rey’s strain of disillusionment,” but it’s this entrancing intersection of romance and morbidity that mostly strikes a similar chord. The setting matters less than the backdrop, which is obviously the end of the world, which matters less than the idea that’s supposed to transcend it: Romance.
The follow-up to 2022’s Skinty Fia is framed as the now London-based band’s least Irish, most Korn-inspired record yet. And while it doesn’t exactly sound like Lana Del Rey or any nu-metal band – if anything, the album’s cinematic, colourful palette and thematic undertones owe more to a visual inspiration Chatten has cited, Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira – what’s remarkable is how much more like themselves Fontaines D.C. sound they further they’re removed from their origins. At their heart is a duality: infectious melodies are elevated by sweet, luscious orchestration – which, with help from producer James Ford, is brighter than ever – yet deeper still is the yearning, more complicated and confounding. Whether the guitars sound grungy and unnerving (‘Here’s the Thing’), shoegaze-y (‘Sundowner’), or acoustic ‘Bell’s on the Sheep’s Neck’), there’s no standing still; all songs run on the same fuel, which is right there in the title, less of an ideal than a chaos of pure feeling. “Stitch and fall/ The faces rearranged/ And you will see/ Beauty give the way/ To something strange,” Chatten sings on the ambiguously endearing ‘Favourite’, which closes out the album. In Romance, we almost hear the transformation happening in the opposite direction.
For Chatten, the sense of being uprooted – as a byproduct of success, more than any material markers of it – seems to have a tangible effect on his writing headspace. Time and time again, he goes deep into his own mind: ‘Starbuster’ airs out a tangle of disconnected thoughts, but the fragments add up to what is a pretty widely identifiable experience of a panic attack. There’s a newfound comfort in his own voice which, rather than watering down the anxiety, actually sheds light on it: notice the way he stresses the words stars, peace. He matches the grandiosity of ‘Desire’ with a uniquely sensual performance that colours the nuances of what could otherwise be seen as empty philosophizing: “It’s high to be wanted/ But haunted is higher/ And the change requires/ Desire.” While he cast himself as an observer on Skinty Fia’s ‘The Couple Across the Way’, his vulnerability here is less self-effacing but no less visceral. ‘Death Kink’ sees him addressing a toxic relationship head-on, haunting and caustic in its melodrama: “When you said ‘I taste like sleep’/ I was dead.”
Thrilling, refreshing, and eerily peaceful, Romance offers no vessel for redemption; for all its musical ambition and urgency, it makes no attempt at an argument for idealism. Against the darkness we’re thrown into as soon as the album begins, the dystopian world that bears no description, the opening “Maybe romance is a place” really registers as just that: a proposition, a maybe. It makes sense that the album often seems at odds with itself: the line between modern reality and that fantastical place is anything but straightforward, and Fontaines D.C. aren’t so deluded as to settle into it. But it’s also no surprise it doesn’t sound particularly conflicted – overwhelmed, maybe, but all the more energized and playful. As far as bands are concerned, there’s no better place to be.
