- 2024-04-18
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Fontaines D.C. Announces New Album “Romance”, Premieres New Song “Starburster” on BBC Radio 1
Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C., consisting of Carlos O'Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan III (bass), Grian Chatten (vocals) and Tom Coll (drums), has announced their fourth studio album “Romance” will be released on August 23, 2024.
The album is their first LP in two years since the 2022 album “Skinty Fia”, and comprises 11-track.
The band spent a month writing the album, followed by nearly a month of pre-production in a north London studio.
They recorded album with producer James Ford in a Paris chateau over another month.
The band guitarist Conor Curley said of the album, “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.”- The album is inspired by Japanese anime Akira by Katsuhiro Ôtomo.
The band frontman Grian Chatten said, “I'm fascinated by that - falling in love at the end of the world,” he says. “The album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger Armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes. We say things on this record we've wanted to say for a long time. I never feel like it's over, but it's nice to feel lighter.”
Guitarist Carlos 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.”
From the album, the band premiered a new song “Starburster” on BBC Radio 1's New Music Show with Jack Saunders.
The track was written by Carlos O'Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan III, Grian Chatten, and Tom Coll. Produced by James Ford.
The accompanying music video was directed by Aube Perrie.
The track was inspired by a panic attack Grian Chatten endured in London's St Pancras station. -
Grian Chatten told Jack Saunders about the song, “I just really enjoy writing. I think I felt like a sort of like sense of immobility. When I was writing the lyrics, I actually had the lyrics written. And I was kind of unsatisfied with them. I was on the way to record them, and had a bit of a freakout, and I sat down and I texted the producer James Ford and said, 'Listen, I can't do this right now.' After the postpone and I just sat down it was just read it and because it just wasn't what was sort of inside wasn't what I was meant to be. But I got it all kind of came out. It is a sort of, like, the writing experience of like listening to yourself as opposed to kind of like, suppressing something, I mean, it was just like, what was already there.”
He said the song was inspired by hip-hop music, “I think when I was a kid, I was really heavily into hip hop. And I started kind of just getting more into recently. I think there's definitely sort of certain Gorillaz elements in the productions. I think what happened I was just in the place like the focus just came from a real place of aggression and kind of frustration. And the all of the vowel sounds can go first. And I kind of had to just figure out what the vowel sounds were.”
He said of the title of the song, “I mean, the idea of the title I think is about sort of like brace your feelings or bracing the kind of the necessary delusion in terms of like, how to sort of function humans are kind of imagined as a world within a snow globe that you can kind of like slip into like a warm bath. But in our world is all the madness and all the hysteria and the sort of, it's just about embracing that.”
Photo by Theo Cottle - source : BBC Radio 1
