Fontaines D.C.’s new album begins with a quote from a gravestone sung by what sounds like a choir of ghosts. “In ár gCroíthe go deo” — which translates to “In Our Hearts Forever” in Irish — was to be engraved on an Irish woman’s tombstone in London, but her family’s request was initially denied by the governing authorities. “It’s just the heartfelt message, but the Church of England itself ruled that it was … at risk of being perceived as a political slogan,” Grian Chatten told Rolling Stone. “So they refused to allow the Irish language to exist on an Irish person’s gravestone.”
The righteously angry song Fontaines wrote in response matches those eerie vocal harmonies with tense bass, nervy percussion, and, eventually, pounding drums. “Gone is the day, gone is the night, gone is the day,” Chatten recites with smoldering restraint, holding back a fire he soon lets loose in the wailing outbursts in between. The music keeps perpetually winding up until the end, only releasing the nervous energy in fleeting fits and starts. After six minutes of this, it feels like Fontaines have collectively willed the epitaph onto the stone through sheer indignation — and indeed, upon emerging from the studio they found out the family’s request had been granted after all.
“In ár gCroíthe go deo” is a gripping introduction that conveys two important truths about Fontaines’ new album Skinty Fia — another Irish phrase, this one an expletive meaning “the damnation of the deer.” One, these guys have been getting deeply in touch with their Irish heritage since relocating from their native Dublin to London during the pandemic, grappling with the ways their culture manifests itself abroad. Two, they’ve solved the problem facing every band that initially trades on the boundless energy of youth: How do you stay engaging once that initial burst of vigor levels off into something like grownup stability?
Fontaines rocketed out of Dublin with the kind of combustible energy you can’t fake — five rambunctious young pub intellectuals bashing away at their instruments, part Strokes and part Pogues, helmed by a singer who leaned into his vowels with a blaring force rarely heard since Liam Gallagher. They funneled all their deep thoughts about culture into tight little rock songs with darkness around the edges and played them with just the right amount of aggressive bluster, in the process becoming a living monument to a city that was rapidly slipping away. Maybe Grian Chatten’s tongue was in his cheek when he announced, on the very first song, “I’m gonna be big!” But he wasn’t wrong.
In the three years since Fontaines dropped their instant-classic debut album Dogrel, they’ve never really stopped getting bigger. They toured relentlessly behind that album and won over thousands of devotees in the process. In the midst of that endless blur of gigs, they somehow recorded a second album, 2020’s A Hero’s Death, which immediately announced Fontaines as a band that would not be simply repeating their hit debut ad infinitum. Despite its more inward, meditative posture, LP2 elevated the band into new realms of international prestige, including American alternative radio airplay and a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. (They lost to the Strokes, but I like their chances in 2039.)
On Skinty Fia, Fontaines seize their moment with their loosest, most exploratory batch of songs to date. A Hero’s Death was too strong to be slagged off as a sophomore slump — any album with highlights as raucous as “Televised Mind” and “A Hero’s Death” is a keeper — but it felt like a transitional release from a band figuring out its place in the world. Fontaines were lost and weary after so much time on the road, and you could feel the weight of all that exhaustion and uncertainty in the music. They were seemingly determined to push beyond the boundaries of their…
Read More: Fontaines D.C. ‘Skinty Fia’ Review