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Apr 17, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Theo Cottle

Irish five-piece Fontaines D.C. have announced a new album, Romance, and shared the album’s first single, “Starburster,” via a music video. Romance is due out August 23 via XL, their first for the label. Aube Perrie directed the “Starburster” video. Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

Romance is the band’s fourth album, the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed Skinty Fia (which was #1 on both the UK and Irish album charts), 2020’s Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, and 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated Dogrel. It finds them working with producer James Ford for the first time.

The band was formed in Dublin but is now based in London and features Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums). Ideas for the new album started to form while they were touring the U.S. and Mexico with Arctic Monkeys. Then the band members went their separate ways for a while, before reconvening for a three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio and one month of recording in a chateau near Paris.

In a press release, Deegan says of the album title: “We’ve always had this sense of idealism and romance. Each album gets further away from observing that through the lens of Ireland, as directly as Dogrel. The second album is about that detachment, and the third is about Irishness dislocated in the diaspora. Now we look to where and what else there is to be romantic about.”

Chatten relates the theme of the album to Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 anime movie classic Akira, where, as the press release puts it, “the embers of love develop despite a maelstrom of technological degradation and political corruption around its characters.”

“I’m fascinated by that—falling in love at the end of the world,” he says. “The album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger Armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.”

O’Connell adds: “This record is about deciding what’s fantasy—the tangible world, or where you go in your mind. What represents reality more? That feels almost spiritual for us.”

In 2023 Chatten released his debut solo album, Chaos For the Fly. Read our interview with him about it here.

Romance Tracklist:

1. Romance
2. Starburster
3. Here’s the Thing
4. Desire
5. In the Modern World
6. Bug
7. Motorcycle Boy
8. Sundowner
9. Horseness is the Whatness
10. Death Kink
11. Favourite

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