Fontaines DC's Grian Chatten on artistic evolution, nu metal inspirations, and the band's upcoming fourth album 'Romance' • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

The flat that Grian Chatten shares with his fiancée is much like that of any other young couple trying to carve out a corner of London for themselves and turn an often hostile city into a home. Compact and curated with minimum clutter, you would never know that it was inhabited by one of modern music’s most lauded frontmen were it not for the BRIT Award for Best International Group that sits looking slightly out of place on a shelf – a signpost to a celebrity world that Chatten has spent the last five years trying his best to be no part of.

Yet in the two years since ‘Skinty Fia’ – Fontaines DC’s chart-topping, award-winning third album; one that placed the Dublin-born quintet at a top tier level even the frontman couldn’t deny – Chatten has been doing some thinking vis-à-vis “the whole fucking rockstar thing”. “I realised that it could be used as a pastiche, almost like an instrument of its own that satirises the creative pursuit rather than just being a role that we inhabit,” he begins. “It made it feel like that whole world was something that could be inducted into our world. It’s not really in our list of ambitions to be a gigantic band, it’s just that I’m quite exhausted of running from the fact that we’re doing well.”

It’s part of the reason why, when Fontaines returned back in April with the visceral throb of ‘Starburster’ – a literal panic attack in sonic form (but more on that later), they emerged like unlikely fashion butterflies, having shed their former skin of brown coats and band T-shirts in favour of a bold new aesthetic that sits on the axis of nu metal and Camden alt-rave mecca Cyberdog. For someone who feels so uncomfortable with the trappings of fame that they profess to disliking being recognised while holding any of their possessions – “I don’t like people peering into my personal life through something that I have,” he shrugs – it’s a surprising move on the surface, but one that actually makes a lot of sense. On fourth album ‘Romance’, Fontaines DC are leaning into everything they’ve previously shunned, analysing it and playing with it, and ultimately using it to their own ends.

“It’s contextualised [this career] in a way that I can process. It’s like conducting a sluice through a chicken so it can enter my consciousness, you know?” Chatten laughs. “I can’t take it seriously but if I’m gonna take it at all I need to take it as a half-joke, which is what part of this record is.” But as well as toying with the notions of celebrity and fame, sending up the idea of being a big, successful band while also being exactly that, with the entire unexpectedly hi-fi roll-out of ‘Romance’, Fontaines are also imparting an important message: pigeonhole them at your peril.

“It was important for me to not have the album be placed in a ‘Dogrel’-shaped box, and I think people are capable of doing that. People want so much for us to write ‘Boys in the Better Land’ over and over again that they’ll be like, ‘Oh, [new single] ‘Favourite’, that’s a bit like ‘Boys in the Better Land’’. So, with the visuals and everything, I just wanted to make sure that you couldn’t do that,” he says. “If you want to listen to that track over and over, you can. Just put it on loop on Spotify. So I think to keep people… not confused, but to make people feel like they don’t fucking know who we are fully is a very important thing for me. And that involves maybe disappointing people or freaking people out. I’m bored of being seen [as I was]. I’m not attracted to myself as a songwriter through those eyes, and in order for me to find what I’m doing exciting enough to finish writing an album, I needed to change the way I viewed myself.”

“ “To make people feel like they don’t fucking know who we are fully is a very important thing for me.” – Grian Chatten

Since laying down the gauntlet with debut LP ‘Dogrel’ in 2019, Fontaines DC have become synonymous with a very specific identity: that of poetic post-punks eulogising their Irish homeland in varying ways, from the trenches of that first album, to ‘A Hero’s Death’’s at-once-removed view as relocated new Londoners, to ‘Skinty Fia’’s delve into the “mutated Irishness” that exists outside of the country itself. Though the sonic presentation has shifted and changed constantly within that time, the image of Fontaines has somewhat remained.

Chatten can still clearly see himself in the songs that made up their blistering breakthrough record. “Oh totally,” he says. “But I think if we didn’t change as a band in that period of time then I’d probably feel more distant from those songs because I’d feel resentful, like those were the songs that trapped me.” And so, determined to keep moving forward with the craft he’s spent a lifetime in thrall to, on ‘Romance’, he isn’t looking back at the place that raised him but around at the strange modern world he finds himself in now: one where you can choose your own illusion, and decide how far to let it take hold.

“The idea of romance in this record is the human desire for context or delusion or fantasy in order to get by. The denial of reality, the suspension of disbelief, which everybody does. I think it’s just a question of how committed you are to that fantasy; how far down the yellow brick road are we gonna go together – us and all of you who are listening to us?” he questions. “We all walk around as if the world isn’t burning, as if people aren’t dying in the global south. You can wake up and choose reality or wake up and choose romance.”

On Fontaines’ latest, romance isn’t served up like a Richard Curtis film or an Ed Sheeran lyric. It is not romance in the Hallmark sense of the word (although there is a lot of love to be found in the deep connections of ‘Here’s The Thing’ or the shoegaze sensuality of ‘Desire’). Instead, romance is in the eye of the beholder; in how you choose to view the world and your place within it. For his part, the vocalist decides that he spends about “60 or 70% of the year” choosing a more rose-tinted way of tripping through life, “and then when I spend more time at home with my partner, I really feel like taking on reality a bit more.

“I think I very quickly become institutionalised on the road,” he continues. “I’m not like Carlos [O’Connell, guitar] where he’ll go on tour and have all his clothes pressed and washed all the time. I’m two days in and I’m a fucking slob. And I have an immature idea of me just being fluid like water and fucking artistic or whatever, but in reality I’m probably just being completely lazy and allowing the world to blow through me instead of standing against it, which is what Carlos does.” But it’s all about how you look at it – one man’s free-spirited artiste is another man’s dirty little oik, we suggest. “That,” Chatten notes, “is incredibly close to the point.”

“ “It feels, for the first time in a few years, like the pace has quickened and we’ve got to hang on again.” – Grian Chatten

When Fontaines DC arrive a few days later for our cover shoot, there’s no mistaking which people in the room are the band. It’s partly, of course, down to their choice of attire: Chatten is sporting a jacket with a spectacled hood that covers half his face turning him into a bug; O’ Connell’s hair is neon pink and green; bassist Conor Deegan has a gold grill on his bottom set of teeth, while even their relatively sartorially tame members – guitarist Conor Curley and drummer Tom Coll – have a spikey jet-black dye job and a snakeskin shirt, respectively. Visuals aside, however, the camaraderie of a truly in-sync gang is palpable and something they’ve worked hard to achieve. Speaking to DIY around the time of ‘A Hero’s Death’, the frontman described the fall-out on their relationships of suddenly being thrust into the industry machine; “No one represented a friend. Everyone was a business partner who was fucking you up a bit.” But a few years on, they’ve learnt the tricks to keeping the good ship FDC on less troubled waters.

“I think we’ve done a lot of work on communication over the last while,” Chatten nods. “We had a fair bit of time off and we were able to become people away from each other again, so we had things to talk about for the first fucking time. It wasn’t like, what can I possibly ask someone that I’ve seen every hour for a year? We grew lonely together on tour, but now we have enough of a three-dimensional personality within ourselves to interest each other again.”

It also takes a strong group of pals to make the bold sonic decisions the quintet have made on their fourth. Across ‘Romance’, creeping industrial prowls slither into life on the title track while ‘Here’s The Thing’ is cut through with breathy panting; ‘Motorcycle Boy’ is woozy and disorientating, while ‘Death Kink’ is a full-on grunge belter. Each track feels bold and confident and widescreen without losing any of the band’s nuance and specialness, emboldened by the production of James Ford (Blur, Arctic Monkeys, Foals) – a swerve from their established working relationship with Dan Carey that, in itself, points to the scale of the album. 

“We had a lot of demos where we’d made these very grandiose tunes. A song like ‘In The Modern World’, the demo was already a very big-sounding song. It was supposed to feel like the end of the world, and I didn’t want it to feel like the end of the world written on an acoustic guitar so it made sense to make a record with somebody who’s able to make some big-sounding things for that reason,” Chatten explains. Among these big-sounding ideas was a now well-publicised embrace of some highly unexpected influences – namely, nu metal titans, Korn. It began, the frontman explains, when they would play the US band in their dressing room to rev them up before a show. “I think we started half-joking about it and then we’d look at each other like, ‘This is actually fucking sick…’” he chuckles. “I was enthralled by Korn at a young age. They had an extremity to them. Even though they’re potentially ridiculous and very American, they were scary and excessive and I found it really interesting. It wasn’t something that necessarily stuck around in my creative DNA for a long time after that, but revisiting it has been fruitful.”

This month Chatten will turn 30, and the embrace of these quote-unquote “uncool” influences feels like the sort of move synonymous with a time in your life when you start to care less about policing your own tastes. “Totally,” he nods, “and to follow that line of thinking one step further, maybe what could be considered uncool is a more interesting ingredient, and why can’t we recontextualise this thing in a way that’s more relatable in this day and age? A good way to upset people musically is to draw from sources that people might not think are cool…”

“ “A good way to upset people musically is to draw from sources that people might not think are cool.” – Grian Chatten

Though its nu metal-shaped origins might have raised a few eyebrows, there’s little question that ‘Starburster’, with its prickly swagger and strangled gasps, marked new and thrilling terrain upon its spring arrival. At Glastonbury, bathed in unsettling neon green light with a packed field fiercely inhaling deeply (surely the weekend’s most disorientating sing-along), they closed their Friday night Park Stage headline spot with the track: the climax of a huge career milestone that felt fittingly rooted in the band’s here and now rather than falling back to an old favourite.

It’s a visceral track for Chatten to perform. Written in the middle of a panic attack, its central sonic motif is a literal gasp for air from the middle of an internal storm that it took him a long time, he explains, to understand. “I only started getting panic attacks on tour a few years back, and they just felt like rage at first. I didn’t realise they were panic attacks and I’d have to run off stage during soundchecks and lock myself in a room and try not to break stuff. It was just a feeling of overwhelm, and probably being burnt out and all those things,” he says. “You feel stifled and inert when you’re overwhelmed, like you’re frozen, and when I felt like that it used to manifest with me wanting to throw something. I’d hit myself in the head because I just wanted to instigate some sort of change, and I think that’s where the energy of the song came from. I needed a great ball of energy to move through me and I think the panic attack was that.”

‘Starburster’ came at the end of this period; shortly after, the frontman received an ADHD diagnosis and things have been calmer since then. But his willingness to put himself back in that place night after night on tour is testament to Chatten’s dedication to his craft. He’s a songwriter in the truest sense of the word – one who speaks of the process with a sense of reverence, like it’s a higher power that he has to channel and commune with. When he’s onto something good, he says, “I always feel like I’m breaking down to a song instead of building a song up, and that’s when I know if it’s right or not”. Even with the music world’s eyes on him, he’s managed to retain an impressive sense of purity with regards to his creativity, blocking out the outside noise and keeping it between him and the page.

“No one exists, there is no audience when I write,” he says. “I think this is a really good album, personally, and I think that’s the reason why it is: that we’re four records in and I still think what we’re doing is really good, it’s because of that [lack of outside interference]. I’m a man of simple pleasures and I just want to be able to disappear for those hours that the songs appear, and for it never to feel like I’m writing for someone else. And I think so far I’ve gotten away with it, and I’m relatively happy. I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, which is a very unique place to be in. I don’t really feel like I’ve worked a day of my life, in that sense.”

A recipe for 'Romance'

Far away from the Irish poets of old, Grian Chatten’s influences across Fontaines’ latest dig into unexpected corners of culture.

Akira (1988 film)
“In Akira, even at the end of the world with this great sense of industry and apocalypse, these characters are able to fall in love and think about other things on a day-to-day basis in order to get by. Their humanity still finds a way to express itself, even in that very dystopian world. And that’s what I wanted the album to feel like – a small relatable expression of humanity in a dystopian world.”

Land Sickness, by Nikolaj Schultz (2023 book)
“I think politics is personal. The climate change crisis is personal and that’s how we need to view it. Land Sickness is an expression of an individual’s experience as a person in the world of climate change, and the existential crisis that he experiences of how everything he does and touches is connected to the crisis. It’s inescapable, everything’s connected. And that feeling of connection to the desolation of the world as we know it is part of what charges our record.”

‘Korn’, by Korn (1994 album)
“I think that Korn brought me further down a particular road musically and visually than many artists did [when I was young ] – probably further than I was comfortable with. The first record’s incredible. I think ‘Blind’ is an amazing tune, and ‘Shootsand Ladders’ is unreal to be playing the bagpipes in that setting, but also [have] a detuned, five-string slap bass – it’s an interesting idea!”

Yet, even though the making of ‘Romance’ involved shutting out the world, even Chatten can sense that, as the release gets nearer, ever-more people are swarming to Fontaines DC in their droves. “I do feel like the pace has quickened again recently in a manner in which it hasn’t since the first record,” he accepts. “It feels, for the first time in a few years, like we’ve got to hang on again.” The band have already ticked off a hefty portion of most artist’s career bucket lists: Number One album. Big awards show win. Massive festival slots and sold out tours, the next of which will see them play to 20,000 people over two nights at London’s Alexandra Palace. They’re objective metrics of success, but it feels genuine when Chatten says they’re not the things they measure it all by.

On the sweetly nostalgic video for ‘Favourite’, old grainy footage of the band as kids is cut together in an adorable montage that begs comparison to the five successful adult men they stand as today. Those kids, we suggest, would surely be stoked to know what was ahead for them. “It’s really nice, and not to be ungrateful, but it’s weird when…” Chatten pauses. “There’s such a fantasy about what’s behind the curtain of this kind of world, and to now live on this side of the curtain, relatively speaking, I do miss that wonder sometimes. Especially when it comes to bands or artists or anyone that you really admired as a kid, and that door’s opened to some extent, and maybe they’re watching you side of stage. It’s nice but sometimes I miss [that innocence]. To know the secret of it, or to know that there is no secret. But there’ll always be a way to make things shine.”

And such is the romance of Fontaines DC. Even now, standing on the cusp of their most objectively large-scale album – one with all the hallmarks of A Big Record that will likely send them into the uppermost tier of festival headlining bands, making them a rare success story in an alternative landscape that’s struggling to turn hopefuls into legitimate long-lasting stars – they’re still looking at the world in the right way, finding beauty and love and humour and ignoring all the other extraneous nonsense.

“I still don’t think that I fully know what’s happening because I don’t allow myself to know it. That’s why, whenever someone recognises me or takes their phone out on the street, it shatters the illusion for me that nothing’s happened. I’m so at odds with it, but now I’m just trying to relax and enjoy it. I know who I am. This is the entire gaff,” he says gesturing to the three rooms that comprise his flat, “and this is all I need. I don’t need to express to myself my own relative success in any way. I don’t hang out with famous people or go to Chiltern Firehouse – I hate that shit. I like walking anywhere I can get by foot; I like taking public transport, and not because I’m trying to stay humble but because I just like feeling like a part of the world. Maybe the crowds keep getting bigger, but I don’t know what else would really change? So I don’t think I’ll be under too much threat.” 

‘Romance’ is out 23rd August via XL Recordings.

All photos shot at Leake Street Arches, Waterloo, London.

All photos shot at Leake Street Arches, Waterloo, London.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, Fontaines D.C., From The Magazine, July/August 2024