ROMANTICIZE THAT

ROMANTICIZE THAT

Ireland's Fontaines D.C. make poetry of post-punk

Taran Dugal

Fontaines D.C. in the flesh are nothing short of animalistic glory. At the postpunkers’ recent gig in Brooklyn, the crowd moved en masse—a seething, kinetic chaos that wreaked havoc on the dance floor. Between songs, an older patron in front of me pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds, lit one with a match, cheefed the entirety of it in four biblical drags, threw the butt down, stomped it out, and then, still reeling from the buzz, promptly fell flat on her face. About 10 feet back, a young man stood with his shoulders scrunched impossibly high, jaw clenched tighter than a junkie’s on the last score of the night. His hips jerked so erratically that they couldn’t have borne a resemblance to anything other than the crazed thrashings of a mutt in heat. He was, to my knowledge, completely sober. The next day, I mention him to Grian Chatten, the band’s frontman, in a park in West Philadelphia.

“Oh, yeah,” he responds, smiling wryly. “That was our manager.”

Consisting of Chatten, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, drummer Tom Coll, and bassist Conor Deegan III (Deego), Fontaines D.C. formed in 2014 at Dublin’s British and Irish Modern Music Institute. Dogrel, their 2019 debut, was up for that year’s Mercury Prize, and A Hero’s Death, their 2020 follow-up, was Grammy-nominated for Best Rock Album. At the 2022 NME Awards, shortly before the release of their third album, Skinty Fia—that’s right, three LPs in three years—they were named “Best Band in the World."

The day after the Brooklyn show, I drive down to meet Grian and Deego at the headquarters of Philadelphia’s WXPN. Despite its claims of brotherly love, Philly, in early spring, is a gray, depressing mass of a city. As I walk into the station, a drizzle picks up. Inside, I meet two label reps who inform me that I’ll be speaking with Grian and Deego separately. Grian comes first.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he mutters in his thick brogue, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I was stuck at Target, buying underwear.”

Away from the stage, Chatten is composed, but he carries an aura of suspended frenzy. You get the sense that the previous evening’s firestorm is lying dormant somewhere in his chest. We set off down some concrete stairs leading away from the station, eventually settling on a bench in a park nearby. He shoots me a look that is equally self-conscious and self-assured. “If you can temper my talk about myself with a bit of talk about yourself, that’d be great,” he says. “I’ve got that Catholic-guilt, self-awareness thing of like, ‘I’ve said three sentences about myself, now I’ve got to stop.’’’

“I WRITE TO KNOW THAT I’m ALIUE”

—GRIAN CHATTEN

Deego, who I meet an hour later in the station’s basement, is slightly more laid-back, but a miasma of self-scrutiny still lingers about him. Such is the life of a rock star in the modern age.

We start by talking about the band’s new album Romance, which is set to come out in late August. It’s an 11-track LP that is, in many ways, quite different from their previous releases. Strings, synths, and sonic loops abound. Some tracks, like “In the Modern World’’ and “Horseness Is the Whatness,” feature massive, roaming soundscapes that are a marked departure from the relatively bare-bones feel of most of their previous discography. “Desire” finds the band leaning into a sound that is equal parts shoegaze and dreampop, with string trills and a soaring, majestic chorus. Other tracks are closer to their roots. “Here’s the Thing" boasts perhaps the most delicious guitar tone I’ve heard since the turn of the decade, and the riff itself is sheer perfection, particularly over Grian’s lilting falsetto. “Death Kink,” the penultimate track, contains a solo straight out of Nirvana’s Nevermind and an explosion of vocal snarls and sustained, ambient distortion. I tell Grian that Black Francis would’ve been right at home on it, and he laughs. “Pixies are all over that song, for sure.”

The size and scope of the record reminds me, oddly enough, of something Kanye West said about Graduation: “On this album, my first priority was to make stadium music.” I expect the comparison to prompt a laugh, but I’m met with slow, earnest nods instead. “Yeah, definitely,” says Deego. “It’s bigger, and more confident for sure. Less fragile.” Grian utters a similar sentiment. “I remember banging the mixing desk at one point and asking James Ford, the producer, to get some cinema out of this thing, d’ya know?” To prove the point, he mentions that “Motorcycle Boy,” the album’s seventh track, is inspired by a character from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 drama Rumble Fish. Chatten continues: “It’s an album that happens more or less inside somebody’s head, and I wanted to make it feel as big as the worlds we have inside our heads." He chuckles. “We really went in on the reverbs this time.”

It’s a logical change of pace. Any artist who insists on painting with the same palette will eventually find their acrylics obsolete, fused to the wood. Slowly, our conversations turn to broader, more philosophical strokes. Why Romance? Deego answers. “You should know, as a writer and musician yourself, that there’s more than one sense of the word,” he tells me. “There’s romantic love, sure, but there’s also our friends around us. Carlos just had a child, you know? Romanticize that. Even fighting for the idea of romance...! felt like I was doing that for a long time, and I thought I was completely lost. But I found it again, and that means I always had it. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t have cared. I think that struggle, in different ways, is a lot of what that record is about.”

Shane MacGowan, of the Pogues, once told an interviewer that some of his lyrics were dictated to him by ghosts wearing period costumes. When I mention this to Grian, he unleashes a thunderclap of laughter and speaks carefully. “I don’t know where I get my words from. I only turn to them when I need them, and I only touch it at that kind of alchemical point. Anytime I write anything, it always feels like the first thing I’ve written for ages.... I like harnessing the energy of beginnings.” He pauses, and elaborates. “I think I’m a person who’s quite easily overwhelmed, so I’ll bank experiences, and later on, I can access those emotions immediately."

When I talk to Deego about writing, we stumble upon a common admiration for Patti Smith (who, mind you, once wrote for this very magazine). It’s hardly a surprise—Fontaines D.C. released two chapbooks of poetry before they ever put out a record. What is Deego’s favorite work by the goddess of punk lyricism?

“Just Kids, to be honest. It’s a fucking sick book." I just so happen to agree, and refer to a quote from the beginning of the memoir, about Robert Mapplethorpe (“He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir”). Deego nods furiously. “There really is an intimacy there, of all these details that so many people, if they sat down to write a book, would completely avoid,” he says. “That’s the thing, I think, of making art that touches people, is having the courage to share that, and to risk absurdity.” I bring up a different work, Devotion, in which Patti illuminates some of the ways that she pulls inspiration from her life and transmutes it into art. Is this something that Deego relates to, as far as Romance is concerned?

“Totally. We started listening to Korn backstage, on a whim, like two years ago." Korn? That Korn? “Yeah, Korn. We’d really worn out our playlist, and we were trying to get ourselves pumped before going on stage, like ‘Fuck, what can we listen to?’ Korn was in our world a bit, but it was very strange, and we felt a disregard for the people around us. Same with some of the weirder OutKast songs—I think that was the start of us really appreciating different ways of production and writing for the new record." Deego stops for a moment, and I see his thoughts wandering. “Sorry...I just kind of latched on to what you were saying about Patti. I love her. I think the feeling of being stirred, it’s not just the excitement of a concert, but also a sense of the meaning underneath the music. Some of the most beautiful moments happen when the intensity of the gig is the gateway into that intimacy.”

Grian and I briefly discuss creativity, and the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with it. I mention something Hemingway wrote, about how the artist must refill their well of inspiration once it’s been depleted. What fills Grian’s well?

“I try to maintain my sensitivity to the world, and I put that in the hands of my friends and family,” he confides. “That’s the well full for me, is when I walk down the street, and everything assumes this Technicolor aura.” What you’re describing, I tell him, is the feeling of a benevolent mushroom trip. He grins. “I’ll take that over content numbness every day. I write to know that I’m alive, to see the proof of that on the page, and to convince myself of my own engagement with the world—that I’m not merely an observer, I’m a partaker as well.”

In the park, the misting of rain ceases, and a soft light settles on the grass. I think to myself that this is possibly the nicest Philadelphia has ever looked, and then I check the time. The label reps are surely having a panic attack at this point. Just as I’m about to suggest that we head back, Grian’s eyes settle on a patch of land across the way. “I wish I was much smaller, so I could have fun climbing that tree. Definitely looks like a fairy type of tree, isn’t it?” When I was younger, I tell him, I used to think the same thing. Grian smiles. “What stopped you believing in that? There are weirder creatures in Parliament. No reason not to believe anymore.”