Romance

Fontaines D.C.’s Romance is a shape-shifting fever dream — jagged, cinematic, and emotionally unrelenting. Released on 23 August 2024, their fourth album abandons the dense, Dublin-rooted poetics of Dogrel and Skinty Fia in favour of a warped, futuristic palette that’s every bit as rich in vision. It’s their first for XL Recordings, and the freedom shows.

From the disorienting anxiety spiral of opener “Starburster” — part post-punk breakdown, part Korn-tinged mischief — to the shoegaze shimmer of “Favourite,” the record twists and turns through genre with remarkable clarity. It’s not just the sound that’s evolved: Grian Chatten, ever the voice of brutal beauty, dips into rapping, crooning, muttering, shouting — often in the same song. His performance here is volatile, commanding, and deeply alive.

The album is littered with visual, literary and cinematic influence: from Dario Argento to Dylan Thomas, Kerouac to Akira. You can feel it in the haunted calm of “Here’s the Thing” and the dusty, end-of-the-road cool of “In the Modern World.” There’s a hallucinatory quality throughout — like watching the heat rise off asphalt at twilight, unsure if it’s real or imagined.

Production from James Ford is sleek but never sterile. The band loosen their long-held live-first ethos and embrace experimentation without losing grit. There are warped guitars, synthetic textures, sudden tempo drops — but nothing feels indulgent. Even the dreamier passages carry that Fontaines urgency; always moving, never settling.

Critics called it their most approachable work yet, and it is. But don’t mistake accessibility for compromise. Romance is still defiantly weird, purposefully tense, and brilliantly alive to the contradictions of its title: intimacy and distance, love and decay, tenderness and terror.

In just five years, Fontaines D.C. have journeyed from punk revivalists to something far stranger and more interesting. Romance doesn’t just mark a new chapter — it fractures the whole narrative and writes something beautifully unknown in its place.