In a room high above the Dublin city skyline, to rehash an early song title of theirs, Grian Chatten and Conor Deegan are surveying their kingdom. These days a Fontaines DC hometown gig feels like something of a victory lap.
We’re on the top floor of the Guinness Storehouse, where later tonight the group’s frontman and bassist will join their bandmates on a double bill with Lankum as part of the Lovely Days Live gig series. The proceeds will go towards the Guinness Dublin 8 Community Fund, which has pledged to donate €1 million over the next five years to local community projects.
“I suppose,” Deegan says, “at a certain point you kind of look at yourself and say, ‘Am I purely an entertainer? Is that all that we’re going to do? Are we going to be something for people to escape from the things in life, or [are we going to] deny them?’” He nods. “We just wanted to use the platform that we have for some worthwhile things.”
We’re also just down the road from Fontaines’ alma mater, Bimm Music Institute Dublin, where the five members of the band first met in 2014 and where they subsequently established a scholarship for students looking to follow in their globe-conquering footsteps.
Chatten smiles as he remembers the band getting a horse-and-cart tour of the Liberties during their student days by a local self-proclaimed tour guide called Marius.
“And the horse was called Ringo,” Deegan says , which delights Chatten. “Marius and Ringo,” he says with a sombre nod. “Sounds like a Tolstoy novel, doesn’t it?”
The offhand literary reference is befitting for Chatten, who has become one of the finest lyricists and most compelling rock frontmen in recent memory. His band, meanwhile, are routinely referred to as one of the best in the world right now, or certainly the pre-eminent Irish band of their generation.
“My reaction to that is, ‘Have you not heard Lankum?’” Chatten protests as notes from that band’s soundcheck drift through the open window. “Lankum, to me, are one of the most concise versions of Ireland that I would like to believe in and live in.
“I’ve seen them a few times, but their set at Glastonbury [last year], and the crowd that they drew, that’s a pride I never thought I’d feel.” He shakes his head. “So I totally brush off the whole ‘best band’ thing, to be honest.”
Like Lankum, Fontaines DC have been unafraid to use their platform for bigger issues. They are vocal supporters of Palestine, and later, at the gig, they will tell the crowd, “No matter how scary it gets out there, don’t stop talking about Palestine.”
[ Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC: ‘We were speeding off the edge of a cliff’Opens in new window ]
We speak a few days after Mo Chara, of Kneecap, has been charged with a terror offence in the UK. Chatten, who collaborated with the Belfast trio on their album (which the Fontaines drummer, Tom Coll, also played on), is unequivocal in his support of the hip-hop group.
“It’s a categorical witch hunt, and that’s fairly plain to see to anyone who has a discerning eye,” he says. “I stand by their side, and I’m totally unafraid to do so. I think all of us are.
“If Sinéad O’Connor was still around she’d be speaking up and [would] probably have another media storm raged against her, as well. So, yeah, that’s what I think about it.” He shrugs. “I just think when you become aware of the facts, how many people are dying” in Gaza, “I don’t really want to live in a world where people turn a blind eye to those things. And I think the best thing for us to do, as people with platforms, is to lead by example.”
The past year or so has been the busiest of the band’s career. Since the release of their fourth album, Romance, last August, their profile has rocketed, winning them new fans globally, breaking new territories and scoring huge radio hits with songs such as Favourite and Starburster.
Chatten, who says he had struggled with the fame that can come with being in a band, agrees that they are “probably acclimatising to it on a deeper level now”, allowing him to live in the moment more.
Yet the band’s ascent has been an undeniably steady one, which has helped in terms of keeping their feet on the ground and their egos in check – although Chatten sheepishly points to the sunglasses he’s wearing. “I’m just jet-lagged, and my eye bags are massive,” he says.
Deegan likens Fontaines’ rise to “kind of like boiling a frog. I think if the band had blown up quickly on the first record to this level, then it probably might have hopped out,” he says. “On a deeper point, it’s reflective of the friendships that we have with each other. That’s what’s kept us going as a band, both literally and musically.”
The past eight months have been the most hectic of the band’s career, as Romance, an album that added new depth, scope, texture and colour to their sound, went global.
Having mined their Irish upbringings on much of their previous material – from the famous opening line of Fontaines DC’s debut album, Dogrel (“Dublin in the rain is mine/ A pregnant city with a Catholic mind”) to sneering references to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on I Love You, from Skinty Fia, their 2022 album – it also arguably brought a newfound universality to their lyrics.
“I feel like on [Romance] we pushed each song to where it wanted to be, more than we have on any other album. On Here’s the Thing, for example, we really committed to that sound,” Chatten says. “Whereas I think maybe, in the past, we’ve slightly compromised by trying to make songs fit in with the rest of the album.
“I wouldn’t want to put its universal appeal down to its un-Irishness, necessarily; sometimes making a culture a massive thing on an album probably doesn’t resonate too much with people. But I do think that there’s a lot on the album that can be a canvas for people to project their own emotions on to.”
The way that they write has inevitably changed as they have spent more time on the road. None of the band members now live in Dublin, and they don’t necessarily write in a room together any more. “That was what dictated the music a lot: what could be played together in a room,” Deegan says. “But moving away from Ireland and going on the road, we weren’t able to play with each other as much as we would have wanted to.
“There was a lot of writing going on with laptops in hotel rooms. And we got into the extra instruments that suddenly you’re able to utilise when you’re using software or things like that – the sound of the mellotron, for example – and it opened up our sound. We basically started making music and then following up how to play it [live] afterwards. Just letting ourselves be free from that restriction.”
Where might the band go next? They’ve jammed some new material during soundchecks on their recent tour. “We’re starting to get that curiosity back again,” Deegan says. “But it’s the beginning stages, and we’re still wrapped up in this tour, and [we need to be] present in the moment with this album.”
“Yeah,” Chatten says, nodding. “I feel like Romance took a lot out of us, personally and creatively. It was kind of like a bomb went off, and there was just that postbomb silence, a ringing of the ears. So I think we’re still being that album a little bit, if that makes sense. It demands a lot of us. And [in terms of] moving on, it seems like I’m not necessarily ready to say goodbye to this version of ourselves yet.”
The song ideas that they have been tentatively jamming, he says, are difficult to pin to a genre or style. “There’s an awful lot of variety, which isn’t necessarily helpful in figuring out what our next album is going to sound like,” he says.
“But, again, we’re just letting the songs be themselves, and giving them the time of day. With Romance it felt like there was a very conscious choice behind where we went with it, aesthetically and sonically, compared to the first three. I want the next album to be the same.”
They aren’t convinced by the idea of writing something overtly political but will continue to speak up when necessary. “It needs to not feel too blunt, and still have a sense of art and self-expression,” Chatten says. “Lankum draw on a reservoir of tradition, so that kind of blesses everything that they do that’s political with a sense of artistry.
“In terms of songwriting, it’s difficult for me to justify shouting blunt orders into a microphone and not feel like I’ve lost something creatively, you know? There is a lot to be said for creating art that stirs people’s emotions in a certain direction without doing that.”
There are still some personal ambitions to be fulfilled, too. Deegan has plans for a solo album at some point. The other members of Fontaines DC – Coll and the guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell – have all had side projects, including producing and even acting, in O’Connell’s case.
Chatten, who has already released a solo album, Chaos for the Fly, has spoken about wanting to publish a book of poetry by the time he turns 30 – which is in July. “Let’s say by the time I’m 32 now,” he says, jokingly.
The band has been shifting, “with people having children and stuff”, Deegan says, referring to O’Connell’s two-year-old daughter. “Grian’s not 30 yet, but the rest of us are in our 30s now, and there’s a kind of a shift mentally for some of us, and what our priorities might be.
“And I think that’s beautiful, to be honest. We’ve been working hard for our 20s to build this thing, and maybe the ambitions don’t need to always be music, you know? Maybe they can be something else.”
It all seems a long way from the days of Marius and Ringo, of snatched moments of jams between soul-corroding day jobs, of the heady days when they could only dream about being a band that mattered to so many. What’s the biggest difference between the Fontaines who released Dogrel, in 2019, and the Fontaines of today?
“About 10 kilos for me,” Chatten deadpans. “No, I’m only messing – it’s probably a lot more.” He smiles, then sighs. “I don’t know. I think that it was inevitable for the sound to change, for us to do away a little bit with the minimalism that we made a virtue of in the early days. I think we’ve become a little bit like maximalist in our approach now, a bit more cinematic, I suppose.”
They look a mixture of bemused and horrified at the thought of Fontaines DC being around for another 20 or 30 years. Do they see themselves as a legacy band?
Chatten mulls it over for a moment. “I don’t know.” He shrugs again. “I’m sure there’s going to come a point where we don’t really understand what’s hip and trendy and all that kind of craic any more, you know?
“And we won’t be parading around in a school uniform, like Angus Young.” He allows himself a smile. “I’d rather put my faith in kind of accepting ourselves. As Deego says, priorities are changing. I think as long as we don’t miscast ourselves in the future, we’ll be all right.”
Fontaines DC play the All Together Now festival, at Curraghmore Estate in Co Waterford, on Friday, August 1st. A bonus turquoise-vinyl edition of Romance, including a 7in of the new songs It’s Amazing to Be Young and Before You I Just Forget, is out on Friday, July 18th
