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May 07, 2020 By Samantha Small Photography by Richard Dumas Fontaines D.C.

“Life ain’t always empty,” insist Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. on their new song “A Hero’s Death,” the title track from their just-announced new album. The song has been shared via a strange video for it. A Hero’s Death is due out July 31 via Partisan. Check out the “A Hero’s Death” video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

The video features Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders) as the host of Tonight Tonight Tonight, walking through a hypnotically sinister backstage full of one-eyes creatures, melting faces, and a great deal of Oreos. The video pairs perfectly well with the song’s unrelenting intensity and spooky harmonies.

In a press release singer Grian Chatten commented on their newest single: “The song is a list of rules for the self, they’re principles for self-prescribed happiness that can often hang by a thread. It’s ostensibly a positive message, but with repetition comes different meanings, that’s what happens to mantras when you test them over and over. There’s this balance between sincerity and insincerity as the song goes on and you see that in the music video as well. That’s why there’s a lot of shifting from major key to minor key. The idea was influenced by a lot of the advertising I was seeing—the repetitive nature of these uplifting messages that take on a surreal and scary feel the more you see them.

“The title came from a line in a play by Brendan Behan, and I wrote the lyrics during a time where I felt consumed by the need to write something else to alleviate the fear that I would never be able follow up Dogrel. But more broadly it’s about the battle between happiness and depression, and the trust issues that can form tied to both of those feelings.”

A Hero’s Death is the follow-up to their debut album, Dogrel, released just last year. As with Dogrel, Dan Carey produced A Hero’s Death, recording it in his London studio. According to a press release, the new album “is anything but a re-hash of the swaggering energy from their first record, instead the music is patient, confident, and complex—heady and philosophical takes on the modern world and its great uncertainty.”

The band also features Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan III (bass), and Tom Coll (drums and percussion).

A Hero’s Death Tracklist:

1. I Don’t Belong
2. Love Is the Main Thing
3. Televised Mind
4. A Lucid Dream
5. You Said
6. Oh Such a Spring
7. A Hero’s Death
8. Living In America
9. I Was Not Born
10. Sunny
11. No

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