Fontaines D.C.: "You can take this romance with you wherever you go, and it can be a way to view the world"

The Fontaines D.C. juggernaut is trundling towards two sell-out gigs in Dublin’s 3Arena at the time of our interview, marking the end of the line for this leg of the Romance tour – but bassist Deego sounds fresh as a daisy. He’s made of stern stuff, when you consider that since the band appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, they’ve played Japan, toured North America and ploughed through the European festival circuit. The ballpark figure is 80 gigs, and with over 6o more already booked for 2025, the pace shows no sign of letting up.

To say their live reviews have been glowing would be an understatement. Reviewers and audiences alike have been blown away by the band’s epic sonic intensity, with crowds welcoming the new tracks like old favourites. But Deego is quick to point out that debut album Dogrel, and sophomore A Hero’s Death, do also figure.

“We’re playing a fairly decent mix of the records,” he notes. “But mostly the new one, because we’re promoting it. We’re in a very lucky position, where we can play a set of mostly new songs and people enjoy it.”

They most certainly do. Romance has grabbed two Grammy nominations, won the Album Award at the Rolling Stone UK Awards 2024, and is The Independent and Time Out Album of 2024. I’m delighted to tell Deego is also Hot Press Album of the Year, to which he courteously replies, “thanks, that’s pretty amazing to get that recognition from ye.”

Deego of Fontaines DC at 3Arena. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

More than well earned, I tell him: it’s a behemoth of a record. Column inches have been dedicated to Fontaines’ sartorial diversion, with comparisons to Korn, Gorillaz and even the Spice Girls. More importantly, the record possesses a gallimaufry of grunge; dystopian electronica worthy of The Prodigy; an intricate expansion of Tom Coll’s Skinty Fia hip-hop percussion; and lordy be, even shoegaze.

On the live front, meanwhile, the band opening their set behind a thin curtain, with the shadows of the band members illuminated by an acid house green glow. They open with the stalking, creeping, utterly quizzing and slowly peaking ‘Romance’, with Grian Chatten proffering, “Maybe, romance is a place for me and you?”.

Then the curtain falls away and there they are – Fontaines D.C., the hottest guitar band in the world right now, surging into Skinty Fia lead single ‘Jackie Down the Line’. I wonder what that feeling is like just before the curtain drops?

“Pretty amazing,” Deego confirms. “Because it’s a strange scenario – usually you walk on and you’re immediately performing to a crowd. In this situation, you get to have a play together, just be the musicians onstage, almost like a rehearsal room. It has a certain intimacy to it, and then once you’ve gotten through the song, the curtain falling exposes you to the crowd and it’s a very exciting thing.”

Romance is wonderfully sonically layered, an indication of which is the recruitment of former Palma Violets frontman Chilli Jesson as an additional touring member.

“We knew that another pair of hands was going to be necessary,” Deego elaborates, “because of all the different layers and things like that. We had to figure out how to make those layers a live reality. For example, on 'Desire', there’s layers and layers of strings. But there’s not a single backing track, just an extra musician playing all these parts.”

Considering the scale of what they are replicating, that one-man job may well fall foul of union rules. Romance covers ground and then some – bottling the feeling of the Japanese municipality of Shibuya at dawn, and channelling the subterranean feel of Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Pusher trilogy, while also doffing the cap to Paulo Sorrentino’s Roman grandeur.

Chuck into that the enduring allure of Kerouac’s canon; the lyrical luxation of Allen Ginsberg; the desperation of cult literary hero Raymond Carver; the marvellous blend of neo-noir space-western in the work of Hajime Yatate; and the Grian-termed “pearly gates melancholy” of Los Angeles. These fantastical spaces, according to the band, can serve to create an escapist place inside of yourself.

Fontaines DC at 3Arena. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Indeed, when Deego lived apart from the rest of the London-based band, he referred to his Parisian sojourn as his “little one-person cult”. I find the Situationist-style psychogeography that Fontaines continuously circle most intriguing.

“Yes, it’s really interesting,” Deego replies. “Because a friend of ours, Nikolaj Schultz, is an environmental sociologist. He worked with a guy who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago, Bruno Latour, an amazing figure in sociology and philosophy. Essentially, one of his main ideas is the unbreakable link between sociology and philosophy. Before, in the past, they would have been separate fields.

“Philosophy came up with ideas in a separate sense – a person speculating about things, thinking about the world, or coming up with ways of viewing it. Whereas sociology was more of a science, an observed thing with facts, research and references. Bruno linked these two things together and showed that you can’t observe a space without having an idea going in. You have to acknowledge that, and also, you can’t do the opposite.”

Deego teases out the concept further.

“You can’t have an idea without the space that you exist in,” he continues. “These are two things that are completely linked, and as such, if I’m in Paris, I have a view of it that is inherent to who I am, as much as the place that is having an effect on me. That’s a really important thing for the album Romance. It’s not so much about Paris as a place itself, because different people would live there or go there and have very different perceptions of it. It’s unique to myself, the romance I see in it. Or the idea that Grian has of LA is a very specific one, based on 1940s movies and things like that.

“We go in with these ideas, and we can write and contrast them with the reality of whatever we find. I think that was something we learned from those philosophies or sociologies; these visions of the world, of something personal that you can take with you. And we wanted to share that with people. You can take this romance with you wherever you go, and it can be a way to view the world. We can take it back from the world as well.”

Fontaines D.C. Credit: Simon Wheatley

Fontaines have mentioned Schultz’s book Land Sickness in interviews, but Deego tells me the ideas he’s speaking of are more derived from a book Schultz collaborated on with Latour, called On The Emergence Of An Ecological Class: A Memo. In it,  the two minds debate whether ecology can aspire to define the political horizon in the way that liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies have done.

That if the ecological movement is to gain ideological consistency and autonomy, it must offer a political narrative that recognises, embraces and effectively represents its project in terms of social conflict. It’s captivating stuff. And there I was thinking that unlike the call-to-arms of Dogrel, the Janus-type psychedelia of A Hero’s Death, and the definition-of-Irishness-abroad of Skinty Fia, Romance did not possess a overarching theme.

“We still have topics within songs and in terms of themes, there still is one,” Deego confirms. “But it was definitely a rejection of a grand theme like we had done in the past. We’d always sat down and talked about what linked the songs together. For Dogrel, A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia, we would have had a whiteboard, which is the way we work. There’d be 30 songs or so, and we would have started to look at the songs as we work through them, saying, ‘Well, what links these different songs together?’

“Once we saw songs that had really strong links, they’d start to emerge as the bulk of the album. But with this one, we abandoned that approach. Because we felt like we wanted to be more spontaneous, and try and just bottle whatever strong emotion was going on with these different songs – to go for a completely different approach. It’s exciting to us as artists to try something new and throw things at the wall.”

That methodology occurred over the course of a month or so at La Frette residential studios, with James Ford in the production chair.

“It was a long process,” Deego explains. “Days-wise, we worked hard. It was a chateau outside of Paris, and it was like a little bubble. That’s a really nice way to work, rather than being in a city. Because I think you can get very distracted when you’re on your lunchbreak or whatever. You can be reconnected to the larger world very easily if you’re recording in a city, but if you’re in a place that’s a residential studio, it’s really just the bubble of the album.

“Everyone’s there to work on the album, not just us, but the staff at the studio. It’s really focused. So even though we were working 12-hour days, we could have been working 16-hour days, in a sense, because it was really quality work.”

As we chat, Deego is in Manchester waiting to trundle down the M62 to Leeds for a show later that night at the First Direct Arena. And so, the Fontaines D.C. live beast rolls on. When I suggest that Dublin is the end of the line, Deego laughs.

“Well, it’s the end of the pre-tour tour,” he says. “Because next year starts the proper tour. It’s three big outdoor venues in the UK, a much bigger tour of America and our first South American tour. And also Central America, Australia, Japan and all the European festivals as well. I think the 24th of August is the last show.”

It’s quite the marathon. Deego assures that mental health is a priority and confirms what you always suspect – the professionalism of the outfit. Perhaps too, as song-of-the-summer, ‘Favourite’, and its wickedly sublime, three-part Beach Boy harmonies advise – you must surrender to the flow. And Christmas is on the horizon, which I suspect will offer a welcome break from the road.

As a band, Fontaines are unapologetically political. So the somewhat enclosed entity that is a touring band is indicated, when I ask if Deego has been keeping an eye on the post-election developments in Leinster House.

“I saw a little bit of information coming in,” he confirms. “I’m trying to keep on top of it. It seems still unclear who’s going to be in power from the election results, but to be honest, I would really like to see a change of things. As long as it was someone in power who wasn’t the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition, which I think is a complete joke.

“In some way, it’s a good thing – these historic enemies completely revealing how little they have that makes them different, and they’re just basically the same. Personally, I would like to see Sinn Féin give it a crack. But also, I think there are other parties that would be good as well, such as the Social Democrats.

“I just want to see some change for Ireland politically. Because there’s a lot of corruption and money being wasted, when Ireland makes a lot of money on taxes and then somehow it disappears on bike shelters.”

It’s time to go. Leeds awaits, then Glasgow, then the Dublin homecoming and beyond, into a frenetic 2025 – and whatever else awaits this exceptional band.

Romance is out now.