The Irish post-punk band’s most demanding and musically adventurous album is also its most open-hearted, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender.
The year 2019 already feels like the distant past for most of us, but for Fontaines D.C., it really must seem like another lifetime—and that has less to do with the pandemic than their own skyrocketing success in spite of it. Pretty much everything that defined this band three years ago, when they dropped their debut LP, Dogrel, has already changed. Once the scrappy underdogs who ironically declared “I’m gonna be big!”, the Dublin-bred quintet have headlined arena shows for crowds of 10,000 in the UK, appeared on CNN, scored a Grammy nomination (outside the Alternative category ghetto, no less), and crossed “multiple appearances on Jimmy Fallon” off their bucket list. Where they once reanimated familiar post-punk and garage-rock influences with a pugilistic intensity, these days they’re more keen on arranging choral harmonies and crooning squeeze-boxed ballads. Even the band’s essential Irishness—reflected in their site-specific lyrics and baked right into their very name—is now up for debate: With four members currently living in England’s capital, Fontaines D.C. can now be more accurately rebranded as Fontaines LDN.
But while one’s identity can be greatly shaped by their home environment, it’s often hardened by their distance from it. On the band’s third album in four years, Skinty Fia, Fontaines D.C. detail what it’s like to be the boys in a not-so-better land, as Irish expats who may share the same skin tone and speak the same language as England’s dominant culture, but who are instantly singled out the moment their accents are revealed in mixed company. Named for an arcane Irish slur that translates to “damnation of the deer”—which, for Fontaines’ purposes, functions as a vivid metaphor of cultural mutation and degradation—Skinty Fia is a record about living in a place that looks like home but doesn’t feel like it. Fontaines D.C. use that feeling of placelessness to their advantage, seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves on a track-by-track basis.
On their 2020 release, A Hero’s Death, Fontaines D.C. already sounded eager to check out of the post-punk revival they helped rally, frequently downshifting into moodier and more melodic territory. Skinty Fia further hammers home the point that this band’s true peers aren’t IDLES and Yard Act, but rather bands like Iceage and the Horrors—groups that erected rigid stylistic barriers only to delight in bulldozing them with each subsequent record. Fitting for an album inspired by moving to London and missing Dublin, Skinty Fia finds its spiritual center at the approximate midway point of Manchester, a city whose rich musical history—evolving out of post-punk into indie-pop, rave-rock, and stadium-sized Britpop—provides Fontaines D.C. with a roadmap of paths to explore.
So while the first thing we hear on Skinty Fia is an urgent Joy Division-esque bassline, the song that’s built on top of it—“In ár gCroíthe go deo”—could never be confused for an Unknown Pleasures outtake. Instead, that rhythmic pulse serves as the unsettled foundation for bassist Conor Deegan III and guitarist Conor Curley’s haunted harmonies, which repeat the title—the Irish phrase for “in our hearts forever”—with funereal solemnity before Chatten’s cries into the void and Tom Coll’s jungle-patterned drum beats steer the song toward its stormy conclusion. Tellingly, Fontanies’ first album as Londoners also marks the first time they’ve foregrounded their homeland’s native tongue in song, and it’s not just for ornamental purposes: The titular phrase was at the center of a media controversy in 2020, when the family of a deceased Irish woman who lived in Coventry, UK tried to have it transcribed on her tombstone, only for the Church of England to demand it include an English translation. For a recent transplant like Chatten, that news story provided a crash course in living as an Irishman in England, where cultural identity is something you have to keep fighting for even when you’re dead.
That homesick, fish-out-of-water feeling manifests itself in myriad ways on Skinty Fia: Where the title track channels Chatten’s uneager-to-please outsider attitude into a strobe-lit industrial funk swagger, “Bloomsday” is a wistful farewell to Dublin, rendered as a melancholic gothgaze soliloquy. But in Chatten’s case, living outside his homeland also provides him with a greater clarity and objective distance to properly diagnose its current condition. Though he’s always balanced shamrock-tattooed pride with tough-love critique, he’s never written a song as angry and anguished as “I Love You.” What begins as a misty-eyed ode to his country gives way to a laundry-list screed on why its brightest minds may feel compelled to leave it, as Chatten sounds off on the church scandals, economic instability, and suicide epidemics that have ingrained a sense of hopelessness in Irish youth. When Chatten disrupts the song’s dreamy atmosphere to rail about his island being “run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws,” it’s like the Stones Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored” being gate-crashed by John Cooper Clarke.
Those drawn to Fontaines for the first-pump fervor of songs like “Big” and “A Hero’s Death” may find Skinty Fia a more forbidding proposition: Tracks like the disintegrated dirge “How Cold Love Is” and the Unhappy Mondays groover “Nabakov” don’t exactly lend themselves to pint-smashing sessions with the lads. But the real triumph of Skinty Fia is that Fontaines D.C.’s most musically adventurous and demanding album to date is also its most open-hearted. While Chatten’s voice remains a blunt instrument, he now wields it more elegantly, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender: On the self-loathing cad anthem “Jackie Down the Line,” he applies a Wembley-ready wail to a Smithsian sway and delivers the sort of capital-c Choon that all but guarantees Fontaines an opening slot on the Oasis reunion tour whenever the Gallaghers finally get their shit together. And on “Roman Holiday,” he paints a beautifully smeared portrait of young Irish lovers making the streets of Londontown their own, haters be damned, tapping into a stream-of-consciousness magic realism that approaches the heady heights of mid-’90s Verve.
But even those moments of grace won’t prepare you for “The Couple Across the Way,” where Fontaines’ exploratory impulses and dogged romantic spirit intersect in a mournful ballad that echoes John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme—albeit performed entirely by Chatten on accordion. Inspired by the singer’s actual Rear Window-esque observations of his neighbors, the song voyeuristically peers into the flat of an argumentative older couple trapped in a perpetual state of verbal warfare, “after 23 years of the same.” In the midst of apologizing to his wife for his latest destructive outburst, the husband makes a comment that’s as poignant as it is devastating: “Across the way moved in a pair with passion in its prime/Maybe they look through to us and hope that’s them in time.” By burrowing into Fontaines D.C.’s particular experiences as strangers in a strange land, Skinty Fia ultimately homes in on the eternal fears—of growing old, bored, bitter, and unloved—that unite us all.
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