ROMANCE REVIEW: Fontaines D.C.’s New Record Embodies the Ardour of Love
How the Dublin band’s new record captured the essence of love and saved me in the process
Romance is a place. Romance is life. Romance is art. Romance is friendship. Romance is everything: the source of the greatest love and the greatest pain. These uncontainable and grandiose concepts about love are what Dublin-born, London-based rock quintet, Fontaines D.C explore on their latest LP, simply titled Romance. The band’s carnal exploration of love itself and how it is sutured into the very fabric of life will enter your body like a drug. More than just an album, Romance is a validating account of how gruelling it is to experience love and its inextricable link to pain– a pain that is so close to the surface of my body, Romance could reach out and touch it.
Lyrically, this album is like a book of poetry, building off of a theme through different perspectives and metaphors. This is unsurprising, considering the band actually originated as a poetry collective, releasing two volumes of poetry before any album. Their poetic mindset extends to the structure of the album, with the titular track being of epic proportions, a sort of invocation of themes that would occur at the beginning of any literary epic. Given the group’s frequent references to Irish literature, specifically James Joyce’s work, it makes sense that they would take on a Ulyssian attitude towards their most epic project yet. “Romance”, the song, serves to define the ephemeral concepts that permeate the record.
The motifs of Romance established by the opening track are about love being so great that it becomes overwhelming. In the song “Romance”, frontman Grian Chatten describes the feeling of reentering the darkness, with love causing him to feel as if there are screws in his head– thus outlining a treacherous picture of love and the desires that accompany it. The rest of the album’s lyrics navigate these internal conflicts, eventually making it to the other side of them and letting love continue to guide them. Track two and the first single from the album, “Starburster”, is a marathon of visceral metaphors which express our most carnal desires; “I want the preacher and pill…/ I wanna bite the phone, I wanna bleed the tone”, Chatten raps, with the echoing refrain of “It may feel bad” underscoring the rap. By the final track, “Favourite”, Chatten sings, “I can claim the dreamer from the dream / Make you feel everything you’ve never even seen.” The suffering endured throughout the album at the hands of love eventually becomes power, with the band embracing every feeling that emerges in the process.
Romance could definitely be deemed a concept album about love itself; love for everything, in its purest form, slowly eats the band alive with a poetic rawness that uncovers the beauty behind its madness, from the carnage of “Romance” to the sweetness of “Favourite”. In the process, it validates the pain caused by the love of those whose hearts burn too big for their bodies. It dives into the desperate and bleak sentiments of lost or abused love head first, coming out the other side self-assured and magical.
Fontaines D.C’s poetry and lyricism have always been exceptional, but musically, this album shows a new side of them – one accompanied by a brighter and more abrasive aesthetic of neon pinks and greens. Romance, instrumentally, is notably edgier than their earlier albums, with a sound that feels bigger and deeper as if to compliment its account of love from a more abstract, visceral angle. In doing so, it builds on the themes of their 2022 record Skinty Fia, taking them in a harder direction sonically. What is also so remarkable about the musicianship of this LP is its exceptional depth; the range of emotions Fontaines cover on this album are paralleled by the difference in sound from track to track, from the punky, almost rap-inspired “Starburster”, to ballads like “In the Modern World”, the shoegaze-esque “Sundowner”, and the sweet indie-poppy “Favourite”.
Yet the artistic savvy of Fontaines allows them to harness extremely diverse, rapturous sounds into a record without it feeling crowded or disjunct. With the genre-bending on this album, the band renders itself transcendent of time, with clear influences of 80s, 90s, and 2000s, alternative music, but hybridised and evolved to pioneer the present and future of rock and all its subgenres. Ultimately, Romance aims to capture the love that makes up our world in its purest form, in all the ways it musically can, from the punky to the operatic to the bittersweet.
With this album, Fontaines D.C shows us that love and romance are so much bigger than what you give to one person– they don’t even have to depend on someone else. In the title track, they say that “maybe romance is a place”, which seems abstract. But, with contemplation and a full listen of the album, it eventually makes perfect sense. Perhaps it was getting my own heart broken worse than it ever has and having to step back into a world that’s mine, a world that’s made more beautiful by the love I put into it, that made this album sweep me out of reality and deter me from the urge to stop loving forever after all the pain. It made me realise that my love is atomic, it radiates from my core and is the nucleus of my life, and it’s so much bigger than the person I gave it to, and it will always be more than enough.
When your love gets used up, taken advantage of, and thrown away like it’s nothing, it becomes hard for you to find it again. I’ve come close to accepting the thought that I shouldn’t have it, that it isn’t for me. But, as if through fate, Romance came to me when I needed it most, and reminded me that love is woven into the very fabric of being, that even if it tears in one part and leaves a cavity that feels like it’ll last forever, love still holds me together in other places until the rips can mend. Because of Romance, I realise how proud I am that my love wasn’t finite. It is limitless. I’m made of love. And it feels like this album, this group’s voice, is as well. Deeply personal and yet completely universal, Romance will unravel your heart and nurture its wounds, reassembling it even stronger.