Written by Thomas Hannah; edited by Ellie Henderson
After their 2022 win for ‘Best Band in The World’ at the NME awards, it’s unsurprising the steady growth surrounding the Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C has been perpetually accelerating since. With shows in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada, and America wrapping up their current 2023 tour, it has been a steep and successful climb for the five music students from Dublin.
With the release of their stunning debut album ‘Dogrel’ in 2019, Fontaines D.C came with a sincerity and immediacy all too rare in today’s algorithm and recipe-based music industry. Branding themselves as serious artists and writers destined for great things, propelled by their own velocity. Fontaines were a fiercely Irish band from the get-go, with all the poetic heritage that comes along with it, and have consistently kept to their roots by name dropping James Joyce on ‘Boys in the Better Land’, and stating in the first line of the first verse of their first album, ‘Dublin in the rain is mine’.
Following up ‘Dogrel’ was 2020’s ‘A Hero’s Death’, a more sombre and introspective work. Chatten’s poetic voice channels the ghosts of Rowland S. Howard and Ian Curtis with lines such as, ‘Swipe your thoughts from Broadway/Turn ideas to cabaret/Water dreams of yesterday/Far behind’ from ‘Televised Mind’. Utilising a simple yet provocative mastery only truly sympathetic poetry can achieve.
Having collectively written two chapbooks of poetry themselves (‘Vroom’ and ‘Winding’) and discovering they each had an equal love for music and literature during their time at university, we see how Fontaines D.C’s most potent power is their voice: One of bittersweet sensitivity, self and societal diagnosis, and most importantly, sincerity. Through the generations, there have been artists of purity and sincerity, reshaping and re-writing the rules after lengthy periods of shallow and commercialised work. And upon cementing their place on the world stage with their newest album, 2022’s ‘Skinty Fia’, Fontaines D.C are proving to be no different.
‘Skinty Fia’ (the namesake of an old Irish swear meaning ‘damnation of the deer’) keeps its influences closer to its chest than its two predecessors, perhaps from natural maturity and artistic progression, or even a purposeful step back from the band’s unwanted ‘post-punk poets’ mantle. Although we still hear remnants of Peter Hook-esque bass lines on tracks like ‘ár gcroíthe go deo’, which quickly becomes outshined by the groups haunting vocal harmonies, ‘Skinty Fia’ is an accumulation of a more purely original and imaginative sound, integrating a wider sonic pallet without doing away with the cutting poetics and artistic prowess.
We hear this particularly in the dingy and unapologetic title track, with its dark tones and throbbing drum line which could easily slip into a soundtrack for masterpieces like ‘Trainspotting’ or ‘Donnie Darko’. We also hear Chatten’s seemingly effortless use of poetic language on his love note to Ireland, ‘I Love You’, setting himself the challenge to transform the overworked nature of the track’s title into something refreshing. Chatten keeps to the simple rule of writing what he knows; a proud Irishman living abroad. Delivering standout lines such as, ‘And they say they love the land, but they don't feel it go to waste/Hold a mirror to the youth and they will only see their face’ and ‘I loved you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest/And I'll love you 'til the grass around my gravestone is deceased’. And with stripped down tracks like the narrative of ‘The Couple Across the Way’ only consisting of Chatten on vocals and accordion, we see another example of simple, honest work. They are also a high-octane live act, with Chatten’s devil-may-care style reminiscent of Liam Gallagher of Oasis or Ian George Brown of The Stone Roses fronting a tight unit of Carlos O'Connell (guitar, backing vocals), Conor Curley (guitar, piano, backing vocals), Conor Deegan III (bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals), and Tom Coll (drums, percussion, guitar). They look as good as they sound, and they sound damn good - like a band destined to be at their best on stage. So with their live performances paired alongside their polished but gut-punching studio recordings, Fontaines D.C. are a group with little boxes left to be ticked.
Fontaines are unequivocally Irish, but it’s hard for one to ignore the provoked sentimentality of 1970s Manchester. With Chatten providing lines like, ‘Believing happiness to be a train that just doesn't stop for you/A pain but a friend that doesn't pretend’ on the poet Kae Tempest’s track, ‘I Saw a Light’ it is easy to romanticize about Manchester, Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, and John Cooper Clarke.
Although at times tipping their caps to those of the past who they are often compared to, as with their cover of The Cure’s ‘Just like Heaven’ at their live show ‘Jameson Connects’ in 2022, Fontaine’s biggest influence will always remain to be Ireland. Like Bob Dylan trying to shake off the ‘spokesman of a generation’ mantle in the 1960’s, some ghosts are bound to follow great artists; Fontaine’s phantom just happens to be ‘the band singlehandedly reviving post-punk poetry’. Proving that when the sonic landscape becomes baron and great artists rise to water the soil, us listening keep them high on their pedestals. Not unlike Joy Division, Oasis, Nirvana, and now, Fontaines D.C.
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