Fontaines D.C. have managed a feat very few other bands have: they’ve released four albums as a band, and all four of those albums have been on the Bacon Top 31: their debut, Too Real was #26 in 2019, A Hero’s Death was #12 in 2020, and Skinty Fia came in at #20 in 2022. Their fantastic fourth album, Romance, is coming in at #27 here in 2024. That’s an impressive run of great albums.

Romance feels different from the band’s past post-punk efforts. This album is darker, more The Cure-like, with a little more force behind it, reminding me of Clinic’s 25-year-old (!) album Internal Wrangler. There’s still Grian Chatten’s Irish-accented, more sung-than-spoken lead vocals, and the four other members building out the music. But there’s more depth to the songwriting that didn’t used to be there. Hit play on the video above, for their song “Starburster.” The monotone verses that lead into the deep-breath chorus immediately puts you on edge. Then at the bridge of the song, you’ll hear Chatten channeling his best Damon Albarn.

These are all positive shifts in the music from Fontaines, but let’s also talk about the videos. “Starburster” above is a strange, alien mystery of a narrative. Chatten uses an inhaler to fill in on the song’s deep-breath choruses, and the story shifts at each breath. Crazy makeup and costumes abound, all in an off-kilter way that makes you feel uneasy. Then there’s the video for “Here’s the Thing,” which features a girl mocked for her high-school talent-show riverdance set who then finds a supernatural girl group to enact revenge on the mockers.

The craziest video is for the song “In the Modern World.” Ewan Mitchell, aka Game of Thrones’ Aemond Targaryen, takes center stage, as a low-life who engages in non-sactioned car-jitsu in public settings. Pretty sure you won’t know what car-jitsu is any more than I did, so watch the video and you’ll get a sense for it. Yes, it’s a real sport. And yes, it’s ridiculous.

The most “normal” video of the bunch is for the song “Favourite,” which leans heavily on old home video footage from the band members’ families, jumping around in the band’s history from birth to now. It actually feels kinda pleasant, especially when compared to the other three videos.

I’m loving this shift in musical direction for Fontaines D.C., and I’m not the only one: KEXP listeners voted Romance as the #1 album of 2024. While I can’t make it number one, it does speak to the strength of the music that came out this year that I’m only able to put it in at #27, through no fault of Romance. Give it a listen, even if you haven’t liked Fontaines in the past. You may be pleasantly surprised.

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A Hero’s Death by Fontaines D.C.

You may remember Fontaines, D.C. from their appearance on last year’s Top 31, where their debut album landed at #26. Proving there’s always an exception to the rule, the Dublin-based band’s 2nd album, A Hero’s Death is anything but a sophomore slump. They created a work of art with their first release, but it wasn’t without mistakes — a little too predictable, a little too derivative. In the short span between that debut and the release of Death in July, they’ve clearly learned how to be themselves, how to create something that sounds like Fontaines D.C. and not like some earlier band they’re mimicking.

The songs they craft are hard hitting – driving drums, strong guitar lines and Grian Chatten’s droning vocals repeating common refrains throughout. Despite the repetitiveness, or maybe because of the repetitiveness, this music hits in a much different way than bands that came before. Those repeated refrains become the titles to the songs. Take “Televised Mind,” for instance. It starts with the line “That’s a Televised Mind” repeated six times. That happens two more times in the song, becoming the defect chorus, despite being only 4 words long. Most of the songs on the album are like that. Reading it this way, it sounds horrible and boring. But there’s something to how they deliver it, the droning yell, the incessant beat. It’s invigorating.

A mix of Television and Juno thrown together in a blender that’s missing a blade or two. The lads in the band (Carlos O'Connell on guitar and backing vocals; Conor Curley on guitar, piano, backing vocals; Conor Deegan III on bass guitar, guitar and backing vocals; Tom Coll on drums, percussion, guitar; the aforementioned Grian Chatten on lead vocals) all met the British and Irish Modern Music Institute, a collection of eight colleges scattered throughout Great Britain. The education pays off, clearly. They chose their name based on the character Johnny Fontane from The Godfather, and had to add a superlative to their name when they found out a previous band called The Fontaines had already claimed the name. “D.C.” was added as the initials for Dublin City.

The video above, for the title song, is fantastically weird. Starring well-known Irish actor Aidan Gillen, who played Tommy Carcetti on The Wire and Littlefinger on Game of Thrones, the video starts out fairly normally before devolving into a sick and twisted fever dream of repetition, ending in Gillen going in to kiss a ventriloquist’s dummy of himself. It’s tough to watch, and the refrain “Life ain’t always empty” replaying over and over and over on top of the visuals is a cruel irony for the pain that Gillen’s character is continually going through. But, hey, at least we got a great song with a great album to surround it.

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1. Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee
2. Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple
3. Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers
4. folklore + evermore by Taylor Swift
5. Untitled (Black Is) + Untitled (Rise) by Sault
6. RTJ4 by Run The Jewels
7. Shore by Fleet Foxes
8. Serpentine Prison by Matt Berninger
9. The Ascension by Sufjan Stevens
10. Making a Door Less Open by Car Seat Headrest
11. Dreamland by Glass Animals
12. A Hero’s Death by Fontaines D.C.
13. Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez by Gorillaz
14. Mordechai + Texas Sun EP by Khruangbin
15. Introduction, Presence by Nation of Language
16. Free Love by Sylvan Esso
17. Miss Anthropocene by Grimes
18. 3.15.20 by Childish Gambino
19. Women In Music Pt. III by HAIM
20. The Third Mind by The Third Mind
21. Superstar by Caroline Rose
22. Impossible Weight by Deep Sea Diver
23. We Will Always Love You by The Avalanches
24. Ultra Mono by IDLES
25. Visions of Bodies Being Burned by clipping.
26. Thin Mind by Wolf Parade
27. The Loves of Your Life by Hamilton Leithauser
28. Palo Alto (Live) by Thelonious Monk
29. color theory by Soccer Mommy
30. Fall to Pieces by Tricky
31. Quarantine Casanova by Chromeo

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#27 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Fontaines D.C.

#12 on the 2020 Bacon Top 31 — Fontaines D.C.