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What, then, lies post post-punk? When the wiry guitars begin to rust and snap and the sprechgesang grows duller than a Dry Cleaning shopping list recital? To their credit, Dublin’s Fontaines DC – pioneers of the recent, seemingly endless revival of the post-punk form – aren’t waiting around to find out. They’ve been gradually expanding, and decelerating, their sound ever since 2019’s frenetic debut Dogrel; by 2022’s third record Skinty Fia – their first UK No 1 – singer Grian Chatten’s dolorous Dublin poetry was washed with dark oceanic swells, accordion laments, and sparse chorales. Not so much a raging young James Joyce trapped in the basements of Temple Bar as the wailings and rumblings of a churlish captive from the bottom of Robert Smith’s dankest goth-pop well.
Where Skinty Fia had a unified stylistic tone, their fourth album Romance takes a more scattershot aim at synth rock, acidic folk, chamber pop, and subterranean shoegaze. Lyrical contrariness is the only predictability. The title track for instance, for which Chatten adopts the sweet, tormented croon he’s been developing since “No” on 2020’s A Hero’s Death, is no doe-eyed petal pluck of a song. Amid creeping Shinto menace and gruesome clangs of fuzz and feedback – a modern, likely unconscious update of Peter Gabriel’s sacrificial 1982 mood piece “Lay Your Hands on Me” – Chatten deadpans Hannibal Lecter’s idea of romantic verse. “I will be beside you/ ’til you’re dead,” he threat-promises. “I pray for your kindness/ Heart on a spit.” The lush, downbeat “Desire”, too, sounds about as horny as early Coldplay, particularly when Chatten seems to envision a building of burning firefighters, their bodies turning to glass.
Instead, the album is a hunt for breeds and aspects of romance beyond the Irish idealism that coloured earlier albums (they’ve all quit Dublin for London since the pandemic). “Starburster” is a cryptic portrait of love in the face of armageddon, painted in slashes of hip-hop percussion and Sixties spy flick guitar, with Chatten rapping so breathlessly he almost collapses into wheezing panic attacks. Orchestral rocker “In the Modern World” dissects life in an urban throuple like a polyamorous hook-up between The Verve, Echo & the Bunnymen and Ultravox. Meanwhile, “Death Kink” presents the gimp’s-eyehole view of an S&M (or just plain abusive) relationship, sounding like Pixies chained up in Garbage’s red room.
That it then gives way to a breezy, Smiths-esque indie folk closer called “Favourite”, featuring a guitar riff that could’ve fallen off Viva La Vida…, evinces the depth and richness that new producer James Ford (replacing Dan Carey) has brought to the band on a record that leaves post-punk in its dust and roars off into broad new horizons. Potential fulfilled.
