Fontaines D.C.

When: 17th November 2022 & 18th November 2022
Location: O2 Academy

Fontaines new album out April 2022 and UK tour confirmed for November 2022. Coming to Glasgow’s O2 Academy for two nights on 17th and 18th November 2022.

Skinty Fia, is the title of the much-anticipated third album by Fontaines D.C. It translates to English as “the damnation of the deer.”

“And the Irish giant deer is an extinct species,” explains bassist Conor Deegan III (aka Deego). “But ‘skinty fia’ is also used as an expletive. In the way you’d say ‘For f***’s sake’ if you bang your arm on a table or whatever. We just thought there was something really beautiful about that, because it’s really representative of Irish culture in some sense. We were interested in the idea of something really precious or sentimental and attached to family. But also something that’s been taken away from us. Which doesn’t mean we can’t cherish it.”

Indeed, and the band’s thoughts on Irish identity are crucial to Skinty Fia. As they have relocated from their home country. 2019’s Dogrel was mostly set in Dublin and was littered with snapshots of the city’s characters. Similar to the cabbie in ‘Boys In The Better Land’ who “spits out ‘Brits out!’, only smokes Carroll’s”. By contrast, their markedly different 2020 follow-up A Hero’s Death was largely written on tour. It documented the dislocation and disconnection the band felt from Ireland as they had new adventures around the globe. This time, they’re addressing their Irishness from afar as they recreate new lives for themselves elsewhere. They are trying to resolve the need to broaden their horizons.

It’s about being Irish

Using the affection they still clearly feel for the land and people they’ve left behind. “It’s about being Irish and expressing that in London. What can you take with you that makes you feel connected to home,” Deego explains. “We really tried to hold on to the things that made us Irish. There’s a sentimentality of sitting in an Irish pub in London, surrounded by other Irish people and it’s 4am. The lights are going off and half-remembering these old songs. On the other hand, there’s something dark and a little bit bleak about that.”

Such new and richly maturing lyrical concerns demanded something different from the music, and the quintet have accordingly metamorphosed again. There are still echoes of Dogrel’s rumbustious rock ’n’ roll and the bleaker atmospheres of A Hero’s Death. However, the third in the triumvirate is much more expansive and cinematic. New elements range from choral harmonies to drum’n’bass-influenced percussive grooves, and Irish traditional music to electronic dance-rock. On one song the solitary instrument is an accordion. Fontaines D.C. are still primarily a guitar-based band, but they are in a state of constant evolution. This time, the result is an album of shifting moods, startling insight, maturity, and considerable emotional wallop.

“There’s definitely a spiritual thread between the three albums,” frontman Grian Chatten considers with trademark gentle intensity. He reflectes on the “huge personal growth” that has accompanied their travels. “We’ve now found homes, places to live, and nurtured our relationships. The songs are different because we’ve got greater emotional tools.”

Touring

The five-piece toured Dogrel – and themselves – into the ground, ending up hardly speaking due to pure exhaustion. A Hero’s Death was written as the band reconnected in Dublin. Rediscovering the joys of being in the group, and came to terms with the previous year’s dislocation and disorientation. Then suddenly the pandemic struck. This meant A Hero’s Death was initially delayed for two months then released as the world was locked down. “It was completely ironic that we wrote an album about feeling disconnected,” reflects Deego – drily“. By the time we got to release it, everyone was disconnected, including us.”

Thus, the musicians scattered to their respective lockdowns in places. Such as the west coast of Ireland or, for Chatten, his parents’ house in Dublin. In isolation, they all beavered away, working on home demos. As well as experimenting with different things until a reunion meant they had the beginnings of a third album. As guitarist Conor Curley remembers, “When we eventually got into a room together there was a whiteboard of about 24 ideas, which we started fleshing out.”

Remarkable opener ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ (In Our Hearts Forever) was one of the first to be realised. Simply “falling out” of a continuous jam session. The band had been moved by a story in The Irish Post about a woman living in England who was battling The Church Of England for permission to have the inscription on her gravestone but was told the Irish language was “provocative”. After laying down the haunting opening mantra of “In ár gCroíthe go deo” that begins the song. The band emerged to hear the news that she was going to be allowed to have it on her gravestone. “It’s the craziest thing,” says Deego, “but had we known that beforehand I’m not sure we’d have sung it with the same conviction.”

Difficult issues or uncomfortable concerns

Fontaines D.C. are not a band to shy away from difficult issues or uncomfortable concerns. “I Love You”, which emerged from that same continuous jam. Finds Chatten addressing his guilt at becoming successful and leaving Ireland. With its bittersweet address, references to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and the recent scandal which unearthed 800 tiny skeletons [“This island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws.”] his words dig deep. In the disturbingly infectious ‘Jackie Down The Line’, the singer observes an abusive relationship and cycles of dysfunction. Whether hereditary or behavioural. The darkness of the lyrics “I will hurt you, I’ll desert you” is juxtaposed with a brighter albeit nuanced tune to dazzling effect.

Where Dogrel reflected the band’s daily soundtrack at the time, this time around inspiration included Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR. As well as sub bass, Death In Vegas’s The Contino Sessions and Pixies’/Sonic Youth’s 90s alt-rock. Throughout the album, guitarist Carlos O’Connell felt those influences shape his overall approach. The epic title track arrived after he’d been playing around with an old Death In Vegas tune. Producing something sublimely simple and groovy of his own.

Although Chatten is still the primary songwriter, O’Connell also came up with music and words for the big guitar-y ‘Big Shot’. The riff and tune came to him after he’d been blasting Nirvana’s Live At Reading album to clear lockdown cobwebs on long “dangerously fast” drives through country roads. Where success can go to musicians’ heads, the guitarist wrote the lyrics about insignificance in the greater scheme of things and the difficulty of “being in the spotlight but retreating to a place in my head where I become a spectator of the world.”

A lockdown jaunt

A lockdown jaunt of a different nature produced the hypnotic, mantra-like ‘How Cold Love Is’. Chatten had visited the sea and staring out at the cold raging mass brought inspiration. Returning to Dublin, he wrote about “the power we give to why we love, and the thread that can exist between a relationship and a vice, such as alcohol. They can be the same kind of thing and a cold experience.” The song’s repetitive, drill-like quality is deliberate: “To sound like someone jabbing at your forehead.”

The rapturous reception to what drummer Tom Coll calls “the huge left turn” of A Hero’s Death gave the band license to be even bolder. Experiments on the album range from a sound-generating app to a random “Yeah,” which Chatten left in because he felt such unscripted moments made the record sound alive. The title track’s dancier rhythm came about after Coll had been channeling Roni Size and Goldie breakbeats. The song itself explores paranoia, anxiety, and the media as Chatten confronted the idea that, with their success, strangers are having conversations about him. The song is “an attempt not to care” but laced with delicious humour: I’m not inclined towards the scandalous word but on the subject of myself I do believe what I’ve heard.”

Perhaps the most traditional yet, in a way, most radical track on the album is ‘The Couple Across The Way’, the result of Chatten getting an accordion for Christmas and observing a rowing couple in the flat opposite, bound together in a destructive relationship. It is simply heartbreakingly beautiful, laden with killer lines such as “You use voices on the phone that were once spent on me.”

For all the musical and thematic disparity that lies between opener ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ and the Conor Curley-penned closer ‘Nabokov’, in which Chatten sings about a submissive relationship, the songs all hang together, reflecting what Chatten describes as producer Dan Carey’s “understanding of them and how they relate to each other.” Although Carey was at the helm for a third time, this time the band relocated from what Chatten warmly describes as the “organised mess” of his tiny London studio to a larger studio in rural Oxfordshire. The bigger space allowed the songs to reach their potential in ways they perhaps wouldn’t have achieved in a smaller room.

Broadening their impact

The album’s bigger sound and reach should also see them consolidate and broaden their impact in the USA, where A Hero’s Death reached No. 2 in the Heatseekers album chart, brought about the band’s second performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and saw them become only the second Irish band in Grammy history to garner a Rock category nomination – for “Best Rock Album”

Skinty Fia is very much a product of the people that made it, the Ireland they grew up in and the country left behind. Perhaps uncommonly in these times, it’s an album that begs to be listened to not a few tracks at a time but in full length sittings, as its rich, profound content reveals more with every listen.

“There’s a bravery about it and it’s just really expansive, musically and lyrically,” considers Chatten, fondly. “The songs have more scope and are fully realised. You might say we’re all really proud of it.”