Album review: Fontaines D.C. achieves boldest sound ever on ‘Romance’

A great song is more than a mere auditory experience. A great song has texture. It can conjure colors and provoke immense, ineffable feelings.

Crafting songs that manifest powerful sensual experiences is a strength of Irish rock band Fontaines D.C., one it brilliantly realized on its third album, the 2022 release “Skinty Fia” — a grave, thoroughly riveting masterpiece of earth-ripping instrumentals and intricate, even literary, lyricism — and continued in its Friday release “Romance.”

While promoting “Romance” — a follow-up album to “Skinty Fia” — the Fontaines appeared a different band — the members’ usual wardrobe of shabby, nondescript T-shirts and tracksuits seems to have been ransacked and swapped for neon apparel with spiky, brightly hued haircuts to match. Complementing the band’s head-turning new getup, the album’s cover art — a distorted, crying heart — features a color palette of vivid pink, blue and green, which are sharp contrasts to the blood red and intense gold of “Skinty Fia.”

However, with Friday’s release, the band — comprised of singer Grian Chatten, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, bassist Conor Deegan III and drummer Tom Coll — proved its new aesthetic not to be a visual compensation for lackluster music. Rather, “Romance” is a dizzyingly ambitious and thrillingly diverse collection of songs — a fearless rush forward into previously untapped, stadium-sized sounds.

Discussing the writing process for the album with NME , Chatten said the band considered “what kind of weather is in [the songs],” and cited “pigeons taking flight at dawn” and “the feeling of a million people passing by but not seeing each other in their own world” among the songs’ inspirations. This unique, far-reaching approach facilitated an album whose music is even more full-bodied and dazzling than its accompanying visuals.

The album’s musical diversity and immersive aura were first teased with its lead single, “Starburster,” released April 17. According to an article from Stereogum, the song was meant to represent a panic attack Chatten suffered, though it’s not necessary to know that to be throttled by its anxious delirium.

Amidst the instruments’ stormy drone, Chatten hurls a torrent of lyrics referencing a motley of topics ranging from drugs to the Screen Actors Guild strike to author J.D. Salinger. There’s a palpable urgency in his delivery, which is periodically punctuated by desperate gasps for breath; it’s as though he’s unable to keep these chaotic word jumbles stuffed down his throat.

Chatten momentarily slows his flow to divulge an urge to “keel,” which is far from the only time the album grapples with responding to overwhelming, almost unbearable feelings.

On the careening “Bug” and strummy, Smashing Pumpkins-inspired “Motorcycle Boy,” Chatten seems to find avoiding commitment easier than upholding promises, presumably to a lover, and the cinematic title track’s overbearing synth and eerie piano make a declaration of steadfast commitment — “I will be beside you till you’re dead” — that sounds more dreadful than endearing.

These songs pose heavy-hitting questions: in the face of doubt, loneliness and unwieldy feelings, should one choose numbness and resign oneself to a pursuit of “momentary blissness,” as in “Starburster?” Or, is it “beautiful to hurt so well,” and does “to be anesthetized” only lead “to [craving] emotion,” as in “Here’s the Thing?”

As the songs explore these queries, they fluctuate not only in answers, but also genres, production tactics and textures, making for a sensational, sprawling whole.

“Sundowner,” a crunchy, surreal shoegaze rocker with lyrics and lead vocals contributed by Curly, seems to owe much of its DNA to subgenre innovator My Bloody Valentine, while “In the Modern World” possesses a heavenly aura characteristic of Lana del Rey’s ethereal alternative pop hits. An embodiment of the sublime, fleeting freedom from “[feeling] anything,” its ethereal string arrangement along with Chatten and Deegan’s breathy harmonies are intoxicatingly blissful, emanating the clarity of morning sunlight.

Other tracks, including the heady “Desire” and ruthlessly paced “Here’s the Thing,” likewise see Chatten explore his vocal range as never before. His falsetto is most heartrending when he cries with child-like fragility on the O’Connell-penned “Horseness Is the Whatness,” in which he questions if “love” is the word “that makes the world go ’round.”

For all its abrasiveness, Chatten’s voice might not be classically great, but in the same vein as Bob Dylan’s, it is strikingly human and distinctly moving. He allows emotion to take over and push the limits of his vocal range, and the resulting vulnerability is absolutely stirring.

As challenging as it is to open one’s heart, the album’s final three tracks — “Horseness,” “Death Kink” and “Favourite” — ultimately favor the fear and pain accompanying wondrous love to an armor of apathy, albeit with night-and-day tonal differences.

“Death Kink” is brutal and blistering, an overwhelming tornado of guilt, regret and fear. When Chatten bemoans having “made a promise” and “killed it” as the whirring guitars come crashing down, the temporality of numbness and ultimate disillusion from living a “meretricious” life becomes clearer than ever. Evidently, the ecstatic relief of emotionlessness depicted on “In the Modern World” is woefully ephemeral.

If detachment for the sake of protecting one’s heart only culminates in torment, allowing oneself to be vulnerable seems to be worth it to experience the wonders of connection and compassion.

Jangly closing track “Favourite,” the album’s heart center, gorgeously embodies the inseparability of bliss and grief in love. In its intro and outro, Chatten sings that he can “make you feel everything you’ve never even seen,” and, indeed, he can. As the music swells with Chatten and O’Connell’s harmonies, it bursts into light in a way few songs can, surging with currents of both wistful longing and explosive joy sure to sweep listeners into its ineffable magic.

It’s an overwhelmingly gorgeous encapsulation of love’s paradoxes, and thus the core of “Romance.” There certainly is something romantic about recognizing how wonderful it is to love so profoundly that it hurts.

For each song’s thoughtfully arranged music and lyrics, all brimming with pure emotions and demanding to be luxuriated in, “Romance” is not only Fontaines D.C.’s most expansive and evocative record, but also among the most sophisticated and thorough musical portrayals of love.

Rating: 5/5