Notes On Fontaines D.C.’s New Album, ‘Romance’: A Conversation with Grian Chatten

portraits by Simon Wheatley.

Some months ago, in an interview we did with Grian Chatten, singer and composer of Irish band Fontaines D.C., when asked how he felt about the then-unreleased new album, Romance, Chatten said, ‘It’s the only album [of ours] that I’ve been able to listen to and fully enjoy… I’d usually be bored as fuck of it by this point, but I still really enjoy it.'

That’s high praise for a band’s fourth album when considering the fact that their first and third albums have both received acclaim with more instances of the word, ‘masterpiece’, than any other comparable contemporary that we could find (we actually searched), and whose second album, A Hero’s Death, was nominated for a Grammy, but more interestingly, Chatten’s admission that Romance - the Fontaines D.C. album whose sound is most distinctly and defiantly estranged from the others in their oeuvre - is considered to be the most listenable is significant when trying to make sense of Romance’s (conveniently linked below this paragraph) brazen musical and aesthetic departure.

As explained in our interview with Fontaines guitarist and composer Carlos O’Connell, following the success of their previous album, Skinty Fia, the band felt comfortable giving themselves the ground to embrace their first musical loves; to abandon the pretension of arbitrary obscurity and plastic individuality in pursuit of something truer, and more authentic: simply liking what you like. ‘The things that you loved don’t have to be belittled by all of the knowledge that you had gained in the years,’ O’Connell explained, and that defiant musical mentality is reflected in the eleven tracks that populate Romance.

The sound of the new album is a large step in a direction that I and hardly any other Fontaines fan could have predicted - one toward the overturned melodies and weighted strums of cited influences such as Korn, Deftones, and the bands of the new millennium that forged a generation of men’s secret love of frosted tips and neon’d, nu-gothism. Romance is a larger sound, a different sound, a sound that is more cinematic and encompassing. 

‘It’s a bit less of a live band, more of a studio album; a bit more produced. [The goal was] to create something that sounded cinematic and subversive. Something that was dense but at the same time, not obfuscated. We didn’t want anything to get in the way of the songs, but they’re thick and layered, and I don’t think that there’s much superfluous activity going on.’ Chatten said.

The album and the surrounding aesthetics bring to mind essences of Baz Luhrmann, the ballads of Smashing Pumpkins, and the revitalized trendiness of Euro/Sci-Fi high-fashion eccentricity of the early-aughts more than necessarily the musical outputs of Korn or Deftones - the references of which I speculate is simply these real and too-abstract references’ lowest common musical denominator - is likely a result of the smashing together of those cited references, the predilections of the band as individuals, and the pursuit of making an album that sounds as large and impactful as one might will themselves to make when inhibition is no longer a factor. 

I have spent a lot of time with this album and writing about this band and this album and all of their albums before, and I find this to be the most challenging. My instinct is to tell you that I mourn the band that I once knew and understood, and that I am confounded by the aesthetic and musical developments that revere genres and musicians that I hold no affection for, but then I must also concede that to take a stance that strong would be to insert myself into a narrative that is reductive of what the music is actually meant to be (art) and to whom it belongs (not me). 

Before proceeding, I would like to be clear that I am not being diplomatic. I believe in being honest in my opinion and shit talking where necessary, and I am by no means a Romance apologist. I did not enjoy this album as much as I had hoped and I want to state that plainly. However, I and every other music writer/annoying critic on Instagram/vlogger who reviews albums so that labels send them for free, have over and over again been forced to eat our words once the light of years are shed, so much so that Pitchfork have devoted an entire segment to re-analyzing music in the context of history to adjust their ratings, and I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to challenge the finality of the review format by offering up a perspective that takes humility and authenticity into account. I do not like AM by Arctic Monkeys - I think that it is an English parody of cock rock - but it is regarded as their transitional break out album, nonetheless. I do not like Romance, but I like it more than AM and believe that it is a piece of work that is profoundly worthy and possessing enormous value.

I don’t like this album as much as I like the previous three, and that is because it draws from and touches on something that I do not relate to, but the band, and thousands upon thousands of fans, truly do. To the classic (stubborn) Fontaines fan, this album is challenging because it is the familiar and much-adored style and composition soup of Chatten, O’Connell, Deegan, Curley, and Coll, only made with a different, more extravagant recipe. I was fed something delicious for three albums in a row, and I wanted another bite, but that isn’t to say that what I’m being given isn’t good enough.

While it is not for me, I cannot deny exactly that- that this album simply isn’t for me. Likewise, I cannot deny its validity and authenticity as a piece of worthy and thoughtful artistic output in the same way that I cannot condemn a painting just because I wouldn’t hang it on my mantle. If anything, this album sounds as true to the members as it is said to. Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums - particularly Skinty Fia - have housed some elusive strain of frustration that made their music sound at once unified and incomplete, whereas Romance is extraordinarily self assured, in the best and worst ways.

There is a palpable confidence to the tracks of Romance that hadn’t yet been heard, even if it be for unfortunate circumstances. Whether the words and melodies are happy or sad, there is no mistaking their position, and where previous albums have straddled a line between a beckon and a beg, these songs step very clearly to one side. In misery or in jubilance, Romance possesses clarity.

‘I bite my tongue a lot because I often stumble on my words when I try to say how I feel in the moment, and I’ve relied on thinking, like, maybe ten minutes later or a day later or fifty seconds later, I’ll have the words and I’ll write it down. If you find something difficult, that’s exactly why you become good at it. The more something confounds you, the more important it becomes to you.’ Chatten said.

When discussing our recent reading habits, Chatten cited two current favorites, both of which illuminate - perhaps unintentionally while they were being discussed - the attitudes, themes, and ideas of Romance’s departing the past and lunging forward toward something wholly new and exceedingly authentic.

One, The Outsider, by Camus, which Chatten related to very strongly, finding an enormous amount of truth in a character who is ‘rigidly himself’, and the second, The Moon and Sixpence of which Chatten said, ‘It’s brilliantly done. The main character is sort of a side character for the first third of the book. He is of no interest in the book until one day he quits his job, leaves the country, and announces that he’s going to be a painter. He kind of leaves his whole family life to waste, and someone asked him why he’s doing it, he said if you throw someone in a swimming pool, it doesn’t matter if they’re any good at swimming; they have to swim, and that’s how he felt.’ 

All of that in mind, I propose a question: can you not like something and still acknowledge that it is good? I submit that the answer is yes.