Fontaines D.C. – Romance
Nostalgia is more than well-earned on Romance, guided by gridiron songwriting that offers no reprieve of excitement across 11 breathless songs
With a snowballing media profile, Fontaines D.C. capitalise on inevitable 'Song of 2024' Starburster’s critical success, the lead single and amuse-bouche of Romance, an album of impeccably considered concepts championed by songwriting that refuses to let the Dublin outfit down.
Musical allusions are fired indiscriminately into the crowd, though the album never errs remotely on pastiche: pinpointing Nirvana amidst Fontaines’ lean-in to grunge entirely, while The Cure, Placebo, The Smiths all exist in the liminal space at the fringes of the album’s downtempo captures; even Lana Del Rey on In the Modern World, call-and-response with amorous background vocals included. Sharing its name with the album, the opening track offers an almost inverted instrumentation of the Us trailer’s orchestral take on Luniz’s 5 On It, surging to whiplashing orchestral hits reserved for the advertisement of horror films.
Nostalgia is more than well-earned, guided by gridiron songwriting that offers no reprieve of excitement. Most notably, however, Romance is an album of internal change: its textual references run the gamut – the imagery of Otomo’s Akira through Joyce’s Ulysses – galvanising into the boundless, ceaseless vitality of the 11 breathless songs which leave the concepts of romance and apocalypse precariously intertwined.
Listen to: In the Modern World, Bug, Romance