Fontaines D.C. have come storming across the Irish sea with their eyes set firmly on finding a voice for those in need. Things have been picking up fast for Ireland’s latest export – not two weeks ago the five upstarts were over in the States for the first time playing shows in New York, before heading to SXSW to play nine sets in a week. That’s not to mention gearing up for the release of their debut album, ‘Dogrel’. Understandably, they’re a bit knackered.
But all of this happy furore comes from the energy naturally surrounding Fontaines D.C. They’re a band who are channelling something real, stemming from a distaste for the scene around them in their homestead of Dublin.
“The music scene specifically at the time was… I dunno if you had this in Britain, but it was a Neo-Soul thing?” bassist Conor Deegan ‘Deego’ III explains.
“We had such a distaste for it because we just loved listening to bands like The Strokes, and then we finally got to live in Dublin as young adults, and to go to gigs and all the bands are these fockin’ shit like, you know? And just pretentious, overcomplicated. But then, they think that they’re not pretentious? That it’s all about feeling, but you couldn’t find a baby that could dance to that shit, like.”
“So we were just reacting to that,” he continues. “We’re not going to have twelve chords in our songs; we’re going to have three chords in our songs, we’ll play them all down-stroke, and we’re just going to talk about shit.”
The outfit – completed by Grian Chatten on vocals, Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley on guitar, and Tom Coll on drums – are a band that you’ll feel swept away by. Drawing people into their world of stark realism, predominantly driven by the furiously hammered said down-strokes of guitar chords that stir something animalistic within – it’s needed, in all honesty. They’re a band formed in the energy of reaction.
“We looked around at Dublin, saw what was happening on the streets, opened our ears, and turned it into some music,” Deego says. “And then we read our favourite poets and got inspired by the romanticism of most of them and started trying to relay it in words; then the two things came together.”
