New challenges for new generations

In the modern world
I don’t feel anything
In the modern world
I don’t feel bad

(Fontaines DC, In the Modern World)

Irish the composition of the newer generation Fontaines DC has decided these days to invest its Dublin post-punk spleen in the pop music of millions. We don't mind. What's more, we hope that many alternative rock bands with potential will immediately follow in the footsteps of Grian Chatten and his friends, making their alienated artistic prophecies that much more accessible to the ordinary world that still buys records or pays honestly for music streaming and concert tickets. It's worth a try. Because Fontaines DC recorded probably the best album until now.

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It was a long time ago when five young men enthusiastically met at the music studies in the Dublin branch of BIMM University - which, among others, attended The Murder Capital, Tom Odell, The Kooks, and our own Luke Black and many other international Eurovision contestants! - immediately deciding to change the world. Ah, that John Lennon and his reveries of revolution through the sound of love and tolerance! Inspired beat poetry, like their compatriots Joyce and Yeats, our heroes started their creative momentum even then as joint authors of two poetry collections, somewhat later breaking the string in the direction of authorship roka. Well, if you've ever doubted the long fingers of art that mysteriously stretch across decades and centuries, Fontaines DC are here to definitively testify to how the old bards - including that Lennon - still speak very wisely about life to this day.

Differing in the beginning from most of their colleagues of the same generation - and, let's remember, they were formed in 2014, while their debut album Dogrel (Partisan) released 2019 - Fontaines DC have always possessed a special kind of rapture, which to the presumptuous consumer of the 21st century could at first seem painfully provincial and shockingly loserish. But never underestimate the tough fruits of this scarce and passionately heated land! Ireland knew that in its poverty it carefully nurtures the rascal geniuses who turn the planet upside down and question with patient persistence every taken-for-granted truth from time immemorial. Their contributions to world cultural heritage are immeasurable. Whether the milk is blue, the ocean is surprisingly pink, and the blades of grass are made of pure velvet - it is unimportant. In the innate psychedelia of this soil, which enchants old and new era alike, the details are totally out. Trice and Kucine, in short. The only important things are pure energy and strong will.

Whether they were fermenting literary language with a Joyce-like hallucinatory oral fantasy or crashing headlong into every obstacle placed in the middle of an imagined life path – the compatriots of the guys from Fontaines DC constantly radiated a thirst for life in their complicated dealings with fate. The more banal she became, the more spectacular the disagreements with her seemed to be a figment of the imagination. From the grayness, hunger, long time, the feeling of personal indestructibility, and yet perhaps also the fear of the corrosive jaws of everyday life, the irresistible ancestral urge to tell stories, what... just, the ancestors created the one, often wonderfully unbearable to the local life, and yet magnetically attractive a spare homeland, where dreams are taken seriously, and long journeys are practically the only currency of the painstakingly bitter mileage of love.

You know Joyce's – the cracked mirror of the maid?

But, stop! Well, Fontaines DC just released their fourth studio album the other day Romance for XL Recordings, as the first release on the new label, including that of new superstar producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Depeche Mode, Florence and the Machine, Kylie Minogue, Jessie Ware, Beth Gibbons, Pet Shop Boys). Therefore, let St. James continue to wander undisturbed through the streams of consciousness in the rassuration with the birth lump. Because this record is currently the quintessential end-of-summer theme - have Fontaines DC imposed their own sonic vision on the chaotic world outside their maladjusted homeland? Or, on the contrary, did they succumb to the greedy will of the music industry, selling their souls to the devil for millions of profits?

We believe it is the first one, but who knows.

The current album, as the title suggests Romance, and a wrapper so nonsensical it's actually downright fantastic—by the way, is the love depicted here some inflated air balloon, wheezing and fleeting, prone to suddenly fly away or burst into smithereens if squeezed too hard? - it contains a wealth of musical experiences of the band members themselves, their collaborators, as well as the ever-increasing audience to whom this work is exposed.

So, watch out, this record represents a kind of turning point in the history of the perception of a musical achievement - not only the listeners experience the album, it also experiences their reaction to itself. As you listen to the songs, you will happen to think how they are constantly changing in relation to your original memory. Okay, so our favorites are from the very beginning, let's say Bug i Sundowner. The first mentioned track almost evokes the raw folk-core the sincerity of Hüsker Dü, while the other very distantly refers to the lyrics of David Bowie: "The Sun Machine is coming down, and we're gonna have a party" from the closing song Memory of a Free Festival from his second album in 1969.

But, next time you're already in style - hey, what about the introduction Romance isn't it just as powerful? Or, don't you like those enchanted voices in Motorcycle Boy? And how about Favourite i Death Kink? Finally, to take one of the most wonderful sentences from Ulysses ("Equestrianism is the essence of every horse") for the title of the song Horseness Is the Whatness, is boldly unmatched. And the boys do not seem artificial at all or as if they are flaunting their high literary taste while the lyrics flow: "Will someone/ Find out what the word is/ That makes the world go round?/ 'Cause I thought it was 'love'".

Well, for such a delicate dose of sincerity, a deep bow, mesiri.

Musically, on Romance there is enough of everything: early The Cure, although even more Depeche Mode; has echoes of fellow U2, and not only because of the same name of the track as it is Desire. There is still a native color, captured above all in the words, as well as a dignified tribute to the forerunners, but a new, more than prudent aura of the band emerges, which conspicuously surpasses the mere local stage. Fontaines DC are stadium fear and trepidation in the announcement, whose sound already seems to have more freshness, real flesh and blood than the slightly blasé Arctic Monkeys. Interweaving ghostly panic episodes with the ruts of city life, his own youthful struggles with early woes and the star's newfound self-awareness, Fontaines DC with Romance invented their own pop expression. It's still astringent, but it slides down the ears better.