Weird drum machines, shoegaze and Danish cinema: how Fontaines D.C. confounded expectations again on ‘Romance’
If you were wondering whether Fontaines D.C. guitarist Conor Curley was the sort of musician who sees guitars as tools and nothing more, disabuse yourself of that notion. As we chat to the Irishman about the band’s new album, Romance, he casually throws in that he’s the sort of person who’s taken hundreds of photos of his guitars, a select few of which make it onto Instagram. “Some people take photos of their dogs, I take photos of my guitar,” he shrugs. Yep, he’s One Of Us.
And he’s had plenty of opportunities to take photos of his gear in fairness. Since Fontaines D.C. burst onto the scene to rave reviews of 2019’s debut, Dogrel, their star has continued to rise, all while the band confounded expectations and refused to rest on their laurels.
They followed Dogrel with a Grammy nomination for their brooding second LP, A Hero’s Death (which was only kept off the UK number 1 spot thanks to some shenanigans by Taylor Swift’s record label). Then in 2022 they blitzed the field with Skinty Fia – a yearning, bittersweet homage to Ireland that snagged the top spot in both the UK and Ireland, and showcased a band blossoming into a rare creative force.
READ MORE: “A lot of the time nowadays pop records are very on the grid”: Wallows on embracing the weird, and Fender Strats
So, how do you top that? Well, you lean into the bands that inspired you in high-school – specifically Korn, Deftones and Outkast – and use it to craft 11 tracks of genre-defying brilliance that is Romance, of course.
For an album that celebrates Fontaines’ brotherhood, it was formed during a period where they went their separate ways. Following a marathon US and Mexico tour with Arctic Monkeys in 2023, the band went in different directions – in some cases literally. Vocalist Grian Chatten headed to Los Angeles, guitarist Carlos O’Connell returned to Castile-La Mancha in Spain, and bassist Conor Deegan headed to Paris.
By the time the band – rounded out by Curley and drummer Tom Coll – reconvened in London, they were hungry to make something new, but also something that fully reflected the music that each member loved to listen to: from hip-hop and electroclash, to metal and pop.
A month together in England’s capital gave Fontaines D.C. ample time to write, followed by three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio, and a month in a studio-chateau near Paris.
The results are spectacular. Listening to Chatten sucking in air and heaving out an urgent torrent of lyrics on the panic-attack-inspired Starburster is reminiscent of the near-hyperventilating delivery of Korn’s Jonathan Davis in his 90s pomp, and proof that the band are tacking firmly towards the unknown.
Image: Eimear Lynch
Strange Fiction
Romance conjures up a universe in which the immensity of love and romance coexists with the tragedy and death that exist on the periphery of our lives. In the face of everything falling apart, love is redemption.
“This record is our first trip into fiction,” Curley reflects on Romance’s thematic bedrock. “A big influence is cinema, and the Danish film series The Pusher, which is like the Danish Trainspotting. We wanted these sounds to be less reflective of the past, and more inspired by modern bands. So, we were coming up with this fictional, futuristic place called Romance to bring us more into the present instead of the late 80s, early 90s influences of the past.”
Romance is an epic, gothic sprawl that feels much bigger than the 11 tracks it journeys through, fulfilling its brief to take us on a tour through the band’s varied musical influences. One standout comes towards the end of the album. As the mood winds down, Sundowner arrives as a woozy, psyched-out, multi-harmony slow jam that thrums to a melancholic, late afternoon, reflective vibe.
It sounds massive, but Curley masterminded it from a closet-sized studio (“a shoebox” he claims) he rents in London.
“I wrote all of the music and vocals for that one, and all of the drum parts and stuff,” he confirms. “When I brought it to the band it was a lot more chaotic, and it is kind of pared down to a bit more of a band song. Originally, it was a lot of very weird drum machines, and the guitars were really industrial, like Nine Inch Nails.”
The layered harmonies and complementary melodies resulted from Curley’s immersion in shoegaze, but the overall vibe owes a debt to another 90s staple.
“I listened to a lot of trip hop, that scene of people who are just taking music from all these different genres and pairing it into something new,” he adds. “I just thought that should be the goal for every kind of artist. So, that was what I was trying to do, to try and take all these different things from different genres and place them in the one song.”
Mind The Gap
In the middle of last year, the band had experienced a gap in their schedule. Chatten used the time to make his well-received solo debut Chaos For The Fly. Curley squirrelled away in his London studio, writing alone, with friends, and with Coll, who had a similar, separate studio down the hall from Curley at the time. The two now share a bigger studio space in the same venue.
“I was working without the new album in mind, really,” he explains. “I knew we’d have to do it eventually, but I was just kind of working on stuff, either for friends, or I was writing with Tom and [guitarist] Carlos [O’Connell] as well.”
After Chatten’s album was released in July, the band reconvened.
“We started sharing songs and started seeing where Romance was ending up, and then we jumped straight into writing after the American tour with the Arctic Monkeys at the end of last year,” he reflects. “Then we started recording our stuff, so it was a slow build into a very quick process, you know.”
That quick process was aided by producer James Ford, celebrated for his work with Arctic Monkeys, Foals and Depeche Mode. It’s the first of the Fontaines D.C. albums to be produced by someone other than Dan Carey.
“Dan’s an incredible producer, but we’re excited about changing it up for the fourth album,” Curley enthuses. “The first three albums seemed like a trilogy. They had a similar production style that was suited to the way we were writing and working. We wanted to work with different producers to see how they would hear what we were working on and interpret it differently to what we’d done before.”
Conor Curley performing with Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park, London, in 2022. Image: Simone Joyner/Getty Images
Two Of A Kind
Four albums in, Curley and O’Connell have refined their two-guitars-in-a-band relationship from the early days of blasting through the speakers with amped up, equally powerful lead and rhythm attacks.
“From becoming better writers, we know each other’s strengths a bit more, and we can rely on each other without as much direction,” Curley reflects. “We could trust each other. There are different parts on this record where I can hear my part, and his parts. Carlos is a keen melodic player, and his use of chorus is kind of like that 90s Smashing Pumpkins style. I know he can do that, and I get really excited when I hear him making stuff up. Vice versa, if he needed something more 80s alternative, kinda cowboy guitar line, then he’d come to me for that.”
That easy rapport extends to the whole band, in fairness, and it is in generous evidence on Romance. Some of the album reflects songs that resulted from improvised jams at rehearsal and soundchecks.
“We can jam an idea for half an hour and a lot of songs come from us rehearsing or soundchecking, riffing for 30 mins while the sound guy is recording it,” says Curley. “We were listening back, figuring out where the intertwining guitar parts work, then learning what we’d been doing.”
From a shortlist of 25 songs and demos, the band pared it down to 13 – with not repeating themselves and showcasing the full gamut of their creativity the order of the day.
“There are two songs we cut from the record, only because the sonics were already represented,” he says. “All of our records have that variation between harder material to softer ballads. That’s the perfect mix of a record for us.”
Conor Curley (left) performing with Fontaines D.C. at Bergenfest, 2024. He plays an American Professional series Jazzmaster. Image: Per Ole Hagen/Redferns via Getty Images
What Should Be
The sound of Skinty Fia for Curley was driven by a Fylde 12-string that the guitarist borrowed from Richard Hawley, but this time around things are much more six-string focused, and specifically Fender guitars.
“Fenders have always just had that look; that’s what a guitar should be,” he explains. “When I got my first proper Mexican Telecaster, there was a huge difference between that and the couple of Epiphones I’d had as a kid. The directness and clearness of Fender… that’s what a guitar should sound like.”
While he’s been a fan of various Fenders both new and old up to this point – from a 60s Coronado to a Johnny Marr Jag, and various Teles and Mustangs – Romance is a record powered “exclusively” by a Jazzmaster.
“I got it while touring for Skinty Fia,” he explains. “It’s the American Professional series, blue, matching headstock. Because we were going for a lot of those more distorted sounds on this, the Jazzmaster offered more of that ability to use overdrives and stack fuzzes, and stuff like that.”
Pedals have always been a big part of Curley’s sound, but this time around it was a chance for him to shift expectations a little.
“For Here’s The Thing, it has this big fuzz line, so I had the Keeley Loomer pedal mixed in with some Boss Chorus, which added a trumpet-y sound, and the Chorus makes it sound a bit alien as well,” he reflects. “I used very little reverb on guitar for this album because I was leaning on it so much in the past, and this time I wanted things to sound a bit closer to your ear, and more dry.”
In a few weeks, Fontaines D.C. will head out on the road for a massive US tour, followed by Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Of all the many tracks Curley is hungry to perform for audiences, there’s one that he’s already chomping at the bit to test out in a live arena.
“Death Kink will become one of the important ones of the set,” he says. “It reminds me of the Pixies, and I’m really happy with how that song turned out. It came from a chord progression I wrote in my house one night, and it has some timing tricks that make it really addictive to play.”
Grizzled, angular and punctured by wails of guitar and noodling, wiry rhythm parts, Death Kink is another stylistic shift on an album that makes a habit of it. Like so much of Romance, it’s begging to be heard live and loud – and that’s exactly what we’re going to get.
Romance is out 23 August on XL Recordings
The post Weird drum machines, shoegaze and Danish cinema: how Fontaines D.C. confounded expectations again on ‘Romance’ appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
