Fontaines D.C. - Skinty Fia (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

On their third album, the Dublin alt-rockers trade in their punky full-pelt approach for measured, compelling insights

Fontaines DC have been a lot of different things over the course of their brief career. Gobby upstarts, loudly proclaiming their own greatness – “my childhood was small, but I’m gonna be big,” crowed Grian Chatten on the opening track of the band’s 2019 debut – and surly self-doubters, prickly distrustful of their own success and acclaim: “Pigeonholed, coo’ed to death,” complained Chatten on its 2020 successor A Hero’s Death. The sound of young Dublin, decrying the limitations of their home city – “if you’re a rock star, pornstar, superstar – doesn’t matter what you are / get a good car, get out of here” – and Irish emigres uneasily relocated to Britain: “London’s fine, did my time / threshed the truth out the lie.” A band who felt like a reset button on an increasingly moribund alt-rock scene, barging to the head of a fresh wave of artists with noisy guitars and sprechgesang vocals, and refuseniks, declining to be part of anything: “I don’t belong to anyone, I don’t want to belong to anyone.”

Given their history, the question of what Fontaines DC are now lurks around their third album. It comes wrapped in a sleeve featuring a nervous-looking deer in the hallway of a home, its title derives from a Gaelic expression of exasperation, and it variously picks at topics of addiction, relationships and the notion of Irishness as viewed through the lens of the Irish diaspora. If its predecessor was an album audibly written by a tour-weary band wary of the hyperventilating reviews and Mercury prize nominations – home to songs with names such as Televised Mind, A Lucid Dream and No – its great skill lay in turning said wariness into songs that felt gripping and realistic, not petulant.

TRACKLIST

01. Fontaines D.C. - In ár gCroíthe go deo
02. Fontaines D.C. - Big Shot
03. Fontaines D.C. - How Cold Love Is
04. Fontaines D.C. - Jackie Down The Line
05. Fontaines D.C. - Bloomsday
06. Fontaines D.C. - Roman Holiday
07. Fontaines D.C. - The Couple Across The Way
08. Fontaines D.C. - Skinty Fia
09. Fontaines D.C. - I Love You
10. Fontaines D.C. - Nabokov



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