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On a red carpet in February 2020, Grian Chatten, the front-man and vocalist for Fontaines D.C., was asked<\/a> about the recent general election in Ireland, which had seen a historic plummeting of support for both of the traditionally dominant (centre-right) parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. The election was proof, Chatten responded without hesitation, of \u201cthe power of youth in numbers\u201d, and that \u201cpeople can conduct change from the ground up.\u201d The insight and inspired radicalism of his reply would have come as no surprise to fans of the band\u2019s music.<\/p>\n Storming to stardom with their first album, Dogrel<\/em>, in 2019, and continuing to chart a meteoric trail ever since, Fontaines D. C. are celebrated for their gritty lyricism and propulsive channelling of young (frequently, male) desires and disaffections, earning them comparisons to Joy Division: \u201cI don\u2019t belong to anyone\u201d, they sing, \u201cI don\u2019t wanna belong.\u201d The brassy tang and reigning emotion in their albums may also evoke memories of the edgy, eloquent angers to be found in early Oasis, who declared, unforgettably, to every shining face in the crowd: \u201cYou\u2019re the outcast, the underclass \/ But you don\u2019t care, because you\u2019re living fast.\u201d Fontaines D.C. pick up this discarded flag and mount it, blazing, on their own high-rising musical barricade. \u201cDublin in the rain is mine\u201d, they yell, \u201ca pregnant city with a Catholic mind, \/ slick little boy with a mind of Ritz \/ pulling that thread for the next big fix \u2013 THIS!\u201d<\/p>\n If Dogrel <\/em>is rooted in Dublin, if it gleams and roars with a furious love for the city\u2019s rain-lashed, broken streets, it also offers a punchy retort to narratives of neoliberal progress in the Irish capital. Government ministers routinely attempt to distract voters from the realities of hardship and degradation (in health, housing, employment, and environmental standards) with vacuous assurances of their own work ethic and a more general (at this point, fanatical) promise of trickle-down economic affluence. By contrast, Fontaines D. C., with their gutsy, punkish sound-bombs, dispel the smoke and shatter the mirrors of the spin-machine, exploding the many fakeries of twenty-first-century Ireland, with each churning verse. \u201cA sell-out\u201d, they shout, \u201cis someone who becomes a hypocrite \/ in the name of money\u201d, while \u201ccharisma\u201d is only \u201cexquisite manipulation, \/ and money is the sandpit of the soul.\u201d Snobbery, elitism, corporate gloss: all these fall to pieces under the pummelling force of these songs.<\/p>\n In some respects, Dogrel<\/em>\u2019s fierce, raucous portrait of life on the frontlines of recession-era Ireland, each track a sonic snapshot from the grassroots up, is resonant of James Joyce\u2019s unflinching, eye-level explorations of social paralysis in Dubliners <\/em>a century ago. <\/em>Both \u2013 the album and the short story collection \u2013 are filtered through the voices and experiences of people living with loss, where exhaustion and damaged dreams are a daily reality, even as the style of telling in each case surges with its own fury, and vitality. \u201cDeath is falling down on your work routine\u201d, we learn, \u201cand it\u2019s falling even harder on your churches and your queens\u201d, everything solid, as it were, melting under the morbid weight of these modern times: \u201coh, don\u2019t be falling hard on the tenement scene.\u201d As in Joyce\u2019s work, the characters we encounter are often vivid, somehow recognisable from our own knowledge of the same pavements. \u201cDriver\u2019s got names to fill two double barrels,\u201d runs one pummelling anthem, \u201che spits out \u2018Brits out!\u2019, only smokes Carrolls.\u201d \u201cHey, love\u201d, closes another curbstone ballad, almost disarming in its softness, \u201care you hanging on?\u201d<\/p>\n Even their more seemingly introspective tracks pulse with rebel energy. \u201cNo\u201d, from their second album, A Hero\u2019s Death<\/em>, is a slow-burning tribute to friendship, but it also stands, as the title implies, as a rejection of broader cultural complacencies and falsities. \u201cThere\u2019s no living to a life\u201d, we hear, \u201cwhere all your fears are running rife, \/ and you\u2019re mugged by a belief that you owe it all to grief.\u201d But if you trust your nerves, you find your truth: \u201ceven when you don\u2019t know, you feel.\u201d These are music-makers whose first instinct and essential need is to keep on keeping it real, every time.<\/p>\n Their recent single, \u201cI Love You\u201d, sharpens the subversive orientation of these earlier songs, explicitly attacking the \u201cthe gall of Fine Gael and the fail of Fianna Fail\u201d, and unearthing the many violences perpetrated and normalised in the so-called Free State: which today exists as a kind of feeding-ground for vulture funds<\/a>, having previously served as a political laboratory for the most reactionary, coercive brand of Catholic statecraft<\/a>. The title and romantic opening seduce listeners, even as the track in its entirety builds to a long crescendo of accusation: \u201cthis island\u2019s run by sharks with children\u2019s bones stuck in their jaws: \/ now the morning\u2019s filled with cokeys tryna talk you through it all.\u201d \u201cI Love You\u201d may be one of the most visceral critiques of Ireland\u2019s political (and media) elites ever articulated in music.<\/p>\n![\"COR](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/COR_Fontaines_DC_first_album.jpg\")
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