Fontaines DC, Alexandra Palace, London review • DIY Magazine

When Fontaines DC eventually headline Glastonbury - which, make no bones about it, we are certain they will one day before too long do - avid cultural commentators will point to this pair of Alexandra Palace shows as the moment that the Dublin quintet sealed their ascendancy. So beyond sold out that, by the time they take to the stage, next summer’s 45,000-capacity Finsbury Park show down the road has also already shed all its tickets, there is such a tangible sense of witnessing A Moment that you suspect 2025’s massive Oasis reunion shows will likely feel like a bit of an anticlimax by comparison.

It’s not just in the absolutely superlative setlist that the addition of this year’s game-changing fourth LP ‘Romance’ has enabled them to bring to the table, it’s in the whole production: the sort of bold, bombastically confident show that could be dropped onto any festival stage in the world and win. Perhaps the biggest compliment of all to the cohesion and brilliance of their current aesthetic is that, when an eerie acid green light floods the space behind the opening curtain, silhouetting the musicians as the pulse-quickening creep of ‘Romance’’s title track begins, you can’t hear a single person even thinking about ‘Brat’.

We could write a dissertation just on that opening four minutes and the genius of that track’s ability to rev up an audience into feral levels of energy with the sparest of beginnings and one snarling, guttural drop of both distorted bass and curtain, but there’s barely a moment over the next 90 minutes where Fontaines even waver below their own highest of bars. ‘Televised Mind’ rattles around Ally Pally’s cavernous walls - a taught stalk of a song matched by Grian Chatten’s caged-tiger pacing energy, while ‘Death Kink’ manages to somehow take 10,000 people shouting “shit, shit, shit, battered” and still refrain from sounding like a terrace chant.

The youthful vigour of early tracks ‘Big’ and ‘Boys In The Better Land’ are both riotous and strangely poignant. It’s hard to fathom that debut album ‘Dogrel’ only came out little over five years ago and how far the five musicians that crafted it have come since; yet for all the creative twists and turns that have followed, those tracks - still so recent, in the grand scheme of life - still feel like an easy fit. Prolific and consistent at every turn, that they can navigate between those sparky opening moves, to the fleshed out clarion call of ‘A Hero’s Death’, via an encore of ‘I Love You’ (Chatten’s peak frontman moment) to the here, there and everywhere brilliance that encompasses their latest only underscores just how relentlessly creative a band they are. It’s easy to imagine there’s probably another few unreleased albums of greatness sitting in the vaults that they just haven’t had time to get to.

It is a true shame when, ahead of a final climactic closer of ‘Starburster’, Carlos O’Connell’s organ trips, forcing the band to leave the stage for a full 10 minutes as stage techs frantically rush about trying to restore order. Thankfully, they do, and as a reward for our patience, the band add an extra ‘Too Real’ to proceedings - a sneering shot of energy that ensures the crowd are right back in their pocket by the time ‘Starburster’’s iconic gasps do finally arrive. It’s already a done deal that Fontaines DC will end up in rock’s history books; not since Arctic Monkeys has a band felt so viscerally capital-i Important to the genre. But tonight feels like the final piece of a jigsaw solving the puzzle of exactly how high they can go. The answer, undoubtedly, is limitless.