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Aug 20, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Simon Wheatley

Irish five-piece Fontaines D.C. are releasing a new album, Romance, this Friday via XL. Now they have shared its fourth single, “In the Modern World,” via a music video. Luna Carmoon directed the video. Watch it below.

Frontman Grian Chatten wrote the song during a 10-day visit to Los Angeles in early 2023. A press release says it’s likely Chatten’s favorite track on the album and compares it to Lana Del Rey, old Hollywood soundtracks, and the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.

Previously the band shared the album’s first single, “Starburster,” via a music video. “Starburster” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared its second single, “Favourite,” via a self-directed video. It was also one of our Songs of the Week. The album’s third single, “Here’s the Thing,” was again #1 on our Songs of the Week list.

Then they announced a fall North American tour. The one-month trek runs from September 20 to October 20 and NYC band Been Stellar will be the opening act.

Then they performed “Starburster” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Romance is the band’s fourth album, the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed Skinty Fia (which was #1 on both the UK and Irish album charts), 2020’s Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, and 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated Dogrel. It finds them working with producer James Ford for the first time.

The band was formed in Dublin but is now based in London and features Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums). Ideas for the new album started to form while they were touring the U.S. and Mexico with Arctic Monkeys. Then the band members went their separate ways for a while, before reconvening for a three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio and one month of recording in a chateau near Paris.

In a previous press release, Deegan said of the album title: “We’ve always had this sense of idealism and romance. Each album gets further away from observing that through the lens of Ireland, as directly as Dogrel. The second album is about that detachment, and the third is about Irishness dislocated in the diaspora. Now we look to where and what else there is to be romantic about.”

Chatten relates the theme of the album to Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 anime movie classic Akira, where, as the press release put it, “the embers of love develop despite a maelstrom of technological degradation and political corruption around its characters.”

“I’m fascinated by that—falling in love at the end of the world,” he said. “The album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger Armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.”

O’Connell added: “This record is about deciding what’s fantasy—the tangible world, or where you go in your mind. What represents reality more? That feels almost spiritual for us.”

In 2023 Chatten released his debut solo album, Chaos For the Fly. Read our interview with him about it here.

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