
When Fontaines D.C. were living in Dublin and making their first album, Dogrel, the five band members would pile into drummer Tom Coll’s car and blast their freshly recorded songs through the speakers. This took some work: the car was so old that they had to connect their phones to an FM converter to create their own radio station, to which the sound system could then tune into. The band’s debut opens with a furious, hypnotic chant (“Dublin in the rain is mine / A pregnant city with a Catholic mind”), before doubling down on that sense of entitlement (“My childhood was small / But I’m gonna be BIG”). They would drive along one bank of the Liffey, the river that runs through Dublin, and back down the opposite side, playing the songs over and over again – a defiant unit, closed off from the outside world. “We were driving in a square; really, really high on our own genius,” singer Grian Chatten says now, deadpan. “The system was so bad you couldn’t tell that the demos were really bad.”
It was 2018; they had just got an agent, signed their first record deal, and quit their jobs. But beneath the outward bravado, there was some self-awareness. After guitarist Conor Curley handed in his notice, he went to the café where his girlfriend worked to tell her the news. She said she was quitting too. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, you should definitely keep your job.’”
It’s the week before the release of Fontaines’ fourth album, Romance, and I’ve come to meet the band in Charleville-Mézières, a small town that sits between France’s Champagne region and the Belgian border. They’re in town for Le Cabaret Vert, a festival they first played back in 2018; three appearances here and as many albums later, they are now near the top of the bill.
This particular performance comes in the middle of a seismic wave that has carried the band from cult status – they’re your favourite artist’s favourite artist – to the cusp of something much bigger. After a slow-burn ascent (a Grammy nomination in 2021, a BRIT award in 2023), Fontaines are everywhere: in Andrea Arnold’s new film Bird, in which Barry Keoghan sings their track “A Hero’s Death” menacingly; on Jimmy Fallon, launching “Starburster,” the first single for the album; at the cover shoot for this issue, at which Paul Mescal said Fontaines were all he was listening to right now. (“They get into your brain and never really leave,” Mescal told GQ.)
It feels like that success is cresting right at this very moment, as they make a straggled arrival on the riverbank in Charleville-Mézières, dressed in a riot of leopard print, neon sunglasses, and Adidas tracksuits. Coll and guitarist Carlos O’Connell first, then Chatten, bassist Conor Deegan III (“Deego,” always), and Curley bringing up the rear.
Fontaines’ ascent is all the more unlikely coming as it does at a time when the all-male guitar band seems like an endangered species. So far, not a single band has topped the Billboard Hot 100 this year. In our era of outsized pop personalities, earnest country boys, and culture-eating rap beefs, indie rock bands feel like relics from another decade.
The few that have found relevance have done so by trying to break the mould of their predecessors (Boygenius) or by their wry, parodic approach (The 1975). Fontaines have thrived as something else entirely: a furious punk-rock outfit taking aim at society’s ills, via Chatten’s snarling shout-spoken vocals, ragged guitar chords, and the thunderclap of Coll’s driving drums.
Even as Fontaines are finally getting their flowers, they’re already in the midst of another rebellion. For the new album, Romance, the band went to war with the image of themselves, pushing a new, softer sound, one that aches with its frustrations and pain rather than yelling it in your face. At the same time, the band have undergone a radical makeover, eschewing their previous go-tos of cardigans, jeans, and leather jackets for outfits that include skirts and knee-high socks, as well as slicked hair in the style of Natural Born Killers.
The new music is more approachable, more mainstream; it also risks putting off the fans that got them there. They don’t care. “You can’t arrest [our] development for the sake of people who get misty-eyed when they hear our first record,” says Chatten.
The decision they were faced with, says Deego, was obvious. “Do we go this conventional, safe route to keep plugging away, or do we actually just go for the bold thing and be brave?”
The five members of Fontaines met at BIMM music college in Dublin (the D.C. stands for Dublin City). There they bonded over a shared love of writers like Yeats and Joyce, and in 2014 formed a band, playing dingy venues and self-releasing a run of singles. In May 2018, shortly before graduating, the band signed their first record deal, with Partisan. “There was a proper excitement surrounding them from the beginning,” the actor Cillian Murphy, another Fontaines fan, told me. “I remember thinking the lyrics were something special when I heard them, and the energy. I saw them for the first time in Dublin in 2019 and already there was a devotion to the band in the audience. They met that expectation and blew the roof off.”
In those early days, Chatten and Curley lived together in a derelict house where the back wall was missing; if you walked far enough down the hall, you’d be outside. The pair would lie in bed together reading “Romance” by the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. It is only now, as we’re talking, that they make the connection to the new album. “Reading ‘Romance’ in bed smoking cigarettes. I was the Verlaine to your Rimbaud!” Chatten says, referencing the poet’s clandestine lover.
“I only like you as a friend, man,” Curley replies.
France in August has a slightly hungover, rueful quality to it: everyone is seemingly away and the shops have shut for the month. Upturned in the river next to us is a rowing boat with the Paris 2024 Olympics logo on its belly. Rimbaud was born and lived here in Charleville-Mézières, and the town seems to be in its own kind of permanent mourning. There are Rimbaud hotels and bookshops and barbers. Bars offer a refreshing bottle of Cola d’Arthur with his likeness on the label. The first time the band played the festival here, in 2018, the five of them bought matching Rimbaud T-shirts and wore them on stage. (“It was a momentary collapse in our desire to be cool,” says Chatten.) Each time they return, the band visit Rimbaud’s house, which has been preserved as a museum. We walk around in silence, reading Rimbaud’s poems on the walls. At one-point Chatten reverently strokes a bit of plaster.
In the courtyard outside, O’Connell, the guitarist whose pink-and-yellow hair is gelled into droopy spikes, is reading a verse from the Rimbaud coffee table book he bought in the gift shop. “I am back in Charleville. I am dying, I am rotting. In the dullness, in the meanness, in the greyness,” he delivers sombrely, then starts to laugh. “The lad loved this town. He loved it.”
As a group they are intense and unexpectedly earnest, trading inside jokes but just as often wading deep into poetry or art with a depth of feeling that is almost awkward to be on the outside of. “The first question Grian ever asked me was, ‘What book are you reading?’” James Ford, the producer who worked on Romance, says. “They’re very serious. They’re not fucking around.”
The introduction to the book that O’Connell is quoting was written by Patti Smith, a hero of theirs. O’Connell recalls an encounter he and Deego had with Smith when she came to Trinity College to speak in 2016. “Me and Deego went to the induction day at Trinity and just pretended we were students,’” O’Connell says. Not only did they make it into the talk, but O’Connell ended up presenting Smith with a book of Yeats’s poetry. He’d spent all his money on it and written a note inside to her. Smith was moved, he says, telling him that Yeats was the first poet she ever read. She told him that as a young girl her father recited Yeats’s work, and she would go around quoting him: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
After Dogrel and the acclaim that followed, Fontaines D.C. found both critics and listeners grouping them together with Shame and Idles, describing their music as “postpunk.” In hindsight, the association makes sense: the three bands captured an angry, anti-establishment tide that a sanitised, pop-saturated music industry had been sorely lacking. But postpunk never really fitted how they truly felt about their music. OK – maybe for a few weeks before they finished writing Dogrel, Chatten concedes. But with their subsequent albums, A Hero’s Death (2020) and Skinty Fia (2022), their management encouraged them to pick the punkier-sounding songs as singles to appear consistent with that early impression.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me, insofar as it made me want to prove that we weren’t that,” Chatten says. “With each record we’ve basically said, ‘There’s no way they can call this a punk record or a postpunk record,’ and they always fucking do. I think if you still –” he breaks off. “Not you – someone – thinks we sound like Idles or Shame, they’re just not listening.”
Fontaines’ early records captured, vividly, a feeling of revolt: whether against the English (fan favourite “Boys in the Better Land” is about a taxi driver embracing his Irishness by shouting “Brits out!”) or their disillusionment at the old Ireland slipping away amid gentrification. Do they miss Dublin? (The band is now largely based in London.) “Like as much as the people who live there miss Dublin,” Chatten says.
Romance represents a different kind of resistance – from the box the band found themselves stuffed into, and the relentless end-times mood of the moment. “I think as the world becomes more and more apparently and inescapably troubled, the more the idea of romance and escapism become really intriguing to me,” says Chatten, his eyes shifting behind his red sunglasses.
We’ve left the Rimbaud museum and are sitting in the town’s central square, which feels like a Disneyland re-creation of a French town, complete with carousel. We sit and wait for a puppet show. Some of the band order beers; O’Connell helps me order a gin and tonic by confidently saying “Jeeen tonique” in a drawl that has been homed in the company of his French partner. There is no moment where someone is not either rolling or smoking a cigarette.
Chatten talks about Romance as a line-up of caricatures or parodies; little vignettes of emotion. It is an album of contrasts: the lush escapism of tracks like “In the Modern World,” interrupted by songs of fury and anxiety. On “Starburster,” written after a panic attack Chatten had at St Pancras station, the kick drumbeat arrives like a foot in your chest. When the band perform it live, Chatten holds the mic up to the crowd, loudly draws in his breath, and you hear an unsettling wheeze as thousands gasp for air.
You have to listen carefully to hear the traces of the old Fontaines. Ford, who has worked with Blur and with the Arctic Monkeys on their striking direction-change album AM, came on board for Romance after seeing how excited the band were to do something different. “I could see that they were looking to pull the tablecloth and shake it all up,” he tells me. Ford encouraged them to do everything more quietly, to bring out different textures and emotions in the music. “There are certain records where you make them and think, I know this is going to go down well.”
I ask Deego how much they write with an awareness of what their fans want. To our left, O’Connell is striking the side of his pint glass and trying to get Curley and Coll to sing the exact note produced.
“Beeeeeeeeeee.”
“The people whose opinions I really care about are these lads here and our manager Trevor,” says Deego. “If they like it, we know it’s good.”
“Ceeeeeeeeee.”
“It’s D, man!” O’Connell says, holding up a keyboard app on his phone to show them.
“Deeeeeee.”
“They’re not doing a good job of proving it now,” Deego says quietly. “But I do really value them.”
The next morning, as we sit in the conference room of their hotel, it’s clear the band have no idea they are days away from some of the best reviews of any album this year. Two coffees arrive from their manager for Chatten, who couldn’t sleep last night. The others make small talk, which doesn’t suit the intensity and earnestness that they normally carry around with them (when they perform there’s barely more than a delayed “Hello”).
The idea of fans feeling betrayed by their new sound irks them – as though they aren’t allowed to evolve. “If they were actively engaged with our music, they wouldn’t really care. They’d be really excited about us changing these things,” says Chatten.
The strong reaction among fans is mirrored in the response to their style shake-up, which feels as significant to the band’s intentions as the album. “At some point I started to think we should be as intentional about [our clothes] as we are about the music,” says O’Connell, who was the driving force behind their new dress sense. “You can have a museum full of amazing art, but if it’s put in a building that looks like nothing, you might walk past.” He references Rosalía as an artist totally in command of her aesthetic and using it to tell a story. Chatten is a big fan of Korn, and recalls the impact of their terrifying outfits as much as the music. Deego slips in wearing a green vintage football shirt with his blond hair in bunches on his head, and then they really get going.
“Music has become more and more about acquiring material you can wear on your Spotify Wrapped,” Chatten says. “We’re just completely disinterested in that. When it changes, people get upset because it’s not the subscription they started listening to two years ago.”
Deego says that a swath of the band’s older, macho fans are now embarrassed to be seen liking a band that wears skirts in photo shoots. “You do see comments like that ignorant kind of stuff,” he says. “They’re wrong, like.”
Railing against an enemy seems to be when Fontaines are at their most formidable and (sorry, guys) their most punk.
O’Connell: “I feel really strongly [about] how strict rock ’n’ roll has become, it feels like total bullshit. There’s nothing radical about it for me. I think we are kind of doing that a bit and some people are explicitly pissed off, you know? They can’t comprehend our clothes; the only way they can comprehend it is coming up with a theory that we’ve been forced into it.”
Deego: “There was a magazine cover where people were like, ‘Grian has been chosen,’ because it looked like he had two horns. Like it was the Illuminati.”
Curley: “Wait, you’re in the Illuminati? When did they ask you to join?”
Deego: “You never check your emails.”
As much as making Romance was a scary departure for the band, it also felt like a return to where they started. The very beginning of what would become the album is its final song, “Favourite,” with its jangling guitar intro reminiscent of The Cure. The track started with a chord progression that O’Connell played to Chatten while they were recording their 2022 album, Skinty Fia. It was a new sound for them, but it had the flavour of bands they used to love, like The Lemonheads and The La’s.
O’Connell had just moved into a flat in London on his own for the first time. The band coined the term apartment rock to describe the feeling it gave them. “It’s like movie songs you hear and you instantly imagine you’re living in an apartment in New York with exposed brick, and have really good friends that you hang out with all the time,” O’Connell says, dreamily.
“Yeah, it’s like these are the good times,” Chatten says. “Nostalgia for now.”
On their tour bus supporting the Arctic Monkeys across North America last year, Chatten was continually rewriting the lyrics to get them just right. Whenever they were in a car together, they played it over and over again – this time without the need to make a pirate radio station to hear it back. “It felt like it had all the chemistry of Fontaines getting together in a room and playing a song,” O’Connell says. “It just became our joy.”
That camaraderie is something for a band to hold on to: a source of confidence in the face of resistance, and kinship at times of on- rushing change. Ford saw the same kind of insular brotherhood in the Monkeys – one that everyone wants in on. “It’s like you’re trying to get into the group, and no one ever really will,” he says. “The us against the world thing is very powerful.”
I think about that idea when Chatten talks about “In the Modern World,” another song on Romance, inspired by a very cinematic, very Fontaines idea of a throuple at the end of time. The way he explains it, it sounds as much like the song could be their own origin story. “It’s like an agreement to escape together,” he says.
A week later, the night before Romance is released, Fontaines D.C. play the 1,500-capacity Electric Ballroom in Camden. Outside, a crowd is waiting in the hope of getting in, while someone walks up and down the queue of ticket holders repeating, “You don’t know how lucky you are.” Inside, the grinning faces know this might be the last time they’ll ever see the band play a venue this small. Watching over from either side of the balcony are Murphy and Harry Styles. When the band appears, it is as though the magnitude of the moment hasn’t reached the stage. They open with a sinister, creeping bass line – and Chatten waits a beat before he starts singing the album’s opening lyrics: “Into the darkness again.” The five of them and the rest of the world.
Story By Olivia Ovenden / Source: gq.com
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