At home with Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten: “Our personality is bigger than the sound that we make”

“It’s nice to have company, it gets very lonely here, you know?” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten smiles after inviting us into his North London flat. A crucifix here, a black skull there, the odd sacred image, a painting of Shane MacGowan and the newspaper front page of the day Elvis died on the mantlepiece – it’s exactly the space you’d imagine the young Irish indie icon kicking back in. But how would he describe the decor?

“Dr Seuss goth granny chic? I suppose, with a little touch of pretentiousness, and a fair bit of ‘Here’s who I am, here’s what I like’,” he offers, before a trademark quickfire dry rebuttal: “Actually, we put it all up for you. I don’t even live here.”

With us both still groggy from being just a couple of days past Glastonbury, Chatten plays an attentive host with the offer of toast as he stomps the floorboards where he believes ghosts await beneath. “There’s definitely something going on under there,” he says. “We just don’t know what it is. It’s like when you check your bank balance, or you don’t, because you’re afraid of what’s in there.”

Spectres aside, embracing the unknown and running with it is what shaped Fontaines’ bold new album ‘Romance’: a record of extremes, high drama, a neon palette and a metallic clash of ideas. It’s a future-facing warp-speed race away from the nostalgia post-punk leanings they found fame with on 2019’s spirited and spunky debut ‘Dogrel‘. To take stock of all that change, we sat down in Chatten’s front room for a big chat about showing gratitude in the face of fear, why death isn’t such a bad thing, fighting for Palestine, and where this whole KoRn aesthetic came from.

NME: Hello Grian. You seemed to having a lot of fun at Glastonbury. Having spoken so much about the difficulty of balancing touring and mental health, how are you finding life on the road now? 

Grian Chatten: “Really good, yeah. Distract yourself with gratitude and all that. I’m really tired of hearing myself moan about it. There’s a great opportunity to really enjoy a very particular and specifically weird life. I’m blessed to be in a position that I can do that. The life I have in this flat with my Mrs is very familiar now; very compartmentalised and cosy. I’m enjoying the duality. Before, I didn’t really have much of a sense of home – I felt very uprooted, and I don’t think that was good for me. I feel secure now.”

That sense of gratitude – is that why you wanted to cram Glastonbury full of moments? You had your own amazing set, you joined Kneecap on stage, and of course had the Jade Thirlwall ‘Starburster’ video easter egg reveal?

“Oh we had nothing to do with that. I just noticed that, but what a legend! She’s cool as fuck. I don’t know where that [t-shirt she was wearing] came from. She probably made it herself. It’s deadly.”

Tell us about your night with Kneecap…

“I got a text from them in the morning and I said no because I was a little worse for wear, to say the least. A couple of hours later I thought, ‘There might be something here’. It was one of those things, as you said, about being very reluctant to miss an opportunity. There are so many opportunities that I get to experience that other people don’t, that it would be a crime not to. Who else gets to go on stage with Kneecap, one of the best fucking bands in the world?

“It’s such a moment for Irish musical history. That Glastonbury was insane for that: Lankum, The Mary Wallopers, Kneecap, so many. It was amazing to be at Lankum and hear them pronounce their solidarity with Palestine, seeing all the Palestinian flags everywhere, then the massive crowd there for this at – at times – really strange fucking music. I felt incredibly at home, and it was probably my favourite part of the weekend. Radie [Peat] is just such an incredible person. I loved it when she said, ‘Good look to the BBC editing that bit out’.”

Speaking of Palestine, you recently released a joint EP with Massive Attack and Young Fathers in aid of Doctors Without Borders. How did that come about? 

“We just did remixes of each other’s tunes. [Guitarist Conor] Curley did a remix of a Massive Attack tune, and it was just a joint effort. We asked ‘What can we do?’ It becomes incredibly tiring and disenfranchising, not just as a musician but as a young person, to be talking about and raising awareness.

“At some point, you’ve got to do something that feels a bit more tangible, you know? Time is ticking and people are getting beheaded and massacred and so on. It really is the responsibility of the masses, of artists, and anyone with a voice – which is most people nowadays – to do something, say something. Which side are you on?”

You’re about to release fourth album ‘Romance’. The last time you spoke to NME about your solo album ‘Chaos For The Fly‘, you said you were intending “to fire a flare up into the sky and see if any help comes back”. Did that work? How did that shape this album?

“[Laughs] Yeah, yeah it did. I’m in a much better place after that, and I think making that record has a lot to do with that. It was an emotional constellation that made a shape to some people. I feel markedly less alone after that record, which was a big part of the reason for doing it. It’s not all doom and gloom – I feel good.”

This is a record full of life with the band really firing on all cylinders. How would you describe how the chemistry altered when you guys got in a room to make ‘Romance’?

“Well the rest of the lads knew how brilliant I was, enough to just let me take control of everything after making my solo record. I’m just joking – they knew that all along! I feel like I dragged myself backwards through a bush with my record, and came out with some interesting branches stuck to my clothes. We just turned those branches into instruments and made our ‘Romance’ album.

“I had a lot more confidence with certain arrangements and ideas. I fucking hate the word ‘experiment’; I’m not Frank Zappa. I was just committed to the ideas that I had. ‘Romance’, as the result of everyone’s musical journey, is our most expansive and full album.”

You also told us you “didn’t want to be judged as the person you were on Tuesday”. Now it really feels like you’ve picked up Fontaines and thrown them into the future. Was that an MO for this record?

“I want to say this in a way that isn’t mean… To be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all other your face. Every now and again you have to fucking shake them off, just to see who you are again. That’s what we wanted to do.

“We spoke a lot about visual references, films and stuff like that. I’m not even messing, but we used to speak about: ‘What kind of weather is it in this song?’ We could meet on a plain that didn’t have anything to do with music, arrangements or instruments. It’s more about abstractly getting to the right place. I think it’s more interesting to work in that way because you’re at less danger of sounding contrived or unoriginal.”

What were some of those touch points? It’s got that cyberpunk thing going on, and sometimes it sounds like a motorcycle race in a futuristic anime film. ‘Here’s The Thing’, especially…

“That’s what it sounds like to me. Isn’t that interesting? It doesn’t sound like the soundtrack or anything from Akira, but it evokes those images. I find that a much more interesting way to write than creating a Spotify playlist of guitar tones. We spoke about pigeons taking flight at dawn, the Shibuya scramble, the feeling of a million people passing by but not seeing each other in their own world, the race to work in the morning, things like that.

“I don’t mean this in a bad way at all, but parts of the west coast of America feel like death to me. It feels like there’s something incredibly morbid about it, but also fantastical and dreamlike. It feels like the pearly gates. That brings an overwhelming feeling of comfort and everything’s very soft lit, but it’s terrifying at the same time. That’s something that gave me inspiration too.”

You’ve said a similar thing about the song ‘Favourite’. Some people might see that like a warm nostalgic comforting glow, but it’s more about accepting how things are and arriving at peace, right?

“Yes. I can compare it to other tunes in terms of how they make me feel. ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed and some Sigur Rós stuff – those tunes are like a warm pat on the back, but it is death itself. It’s like the final hug. I like the idea of a song being the saddest and happiest or the scariest and happiest song possible.

“It’s not about a balance of something being 50 per cent this and 50 per cent that, but it being 100 per cent this while also 100 per cent that. ‘There She Goes’ [by The Las] is one of our biggest inspirations ever for that reason, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ [by The Only Ones’] too. They’re endless but they’re also ephemeral. They’ve got to end as soon as the lights come on in the bar, but right now it’s forever. It is forever contained in a minute.

“I’m just full of contradictions. It’s an absurd thing to be interviewed because I don’t really fucking know what I’m talking about!”

What’s the significance of ending the record on ‘Favourite’? If it is death, is it the end of a journey?

“Yes, but if it’s death then it’s clearly the beginning of a journey too. It makes sense as the end. It’s like Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, to get my daily reference in, but it ends with the same sentence that it begins with. There’s a cyclical nature of that. I like the idea of the needle being stuck in one groove and just going round and round forever. That’s like faith. It’s fascinating that so much of the world’s control and power dynamic is based on the one thing that no one knows anything about because no one has ever come back from death and said, ‘This is what actually happens’.”

“You just decide to know rather than believe. That’s all we have and that’s what faith is. That’s why ‘Favourite’ is at the end of the record – it would be weird to have it in the middle and have the next song as a response to something that nobody knows.”

A lot has been said about how your first two albums were rooted in Ireland, while ‘Skinty Fia’ was about the exit wounds of leaving. It’s interesting that this album is set in the concept with the lyric: ‘Maybe romance is a place’…

“The idea of romance as a place comes from the idea of a simulation. I’m thinking of a zoo with a glass wall, the spectators and the spectacle, the penguins on one side and the people on the other, manufactured realities committed to the fantasies of either one. We’ve all seen the fucking Matrix, so I’m not saying anything particularly new here, but it’s interesting to decide to know what your reality is.

“You can either be at odds with it and carry that search for truth, or you can relax into that warm bath of madness and delusion, which is what a functioning society does.”

If the songs were more inspired by an aesthetic idea, how did the band land on the aesthetic of this album? Is it just a natural amalgamation of the sounds you landed on? The words ‘KoRn’ and ‘cyberpunk’ have been thrown around a lot…

“Some of the music is exaggerated in that sense. The colours that I hear in the music are not colours that you’d find in nature. The songs sound neon and ridiculous. In order to communicate that idea thoroughly, I didn’t want to go out on stage dressed the same as I was for ‘Dogrel’ or whatever. I wanted to put the audience in the right mindset to render them sensitive to the message we were trying to convey.”

You said that at the album playback for ‘Dogrel’, you were sat down in the corner writing lyrics for follow-up ‘A Hero’s Death’. Are you always one step ahead? Is that where you’re at right now?

“I feel vulnerable if I’m out of bullets. It’s nice to have something on, or a card up your sleeve that no one else knows about. It’s like one-out, one-in. You need to maintain the relationship between you and your creativity to ensure there’s something between you and it to be in constant conversation. That’s hard when you’re in constant conversation with the outside world, so it’s important to drown that out with what you’re doing next.”

Other bands who reached your success might have gone to a major label and made their ‘AM’ by Arctic Monkeys or written a huge pop record, but you’ve come back all neon green with a really extreme sound. Did you sign to XL Records because they’re the home of that kind of weirdness and give you that freedom?

“Yes, XL have always been really good at communicating ideas visually. We wanted to do something that felt like a genuine degree away from what we’d done before and they were good people to put our trust into.”

Do you have expectations of success with this record, or is it more about the act of doing and finding that distraction you were talking about?

“Yeah, I couldn’t give a fuck. I think it’s a really fucking good record and I’m buzzing just to have written it and to play it. I’m just trying to pat myself on the back a bit, to be honest with you. Historically, I don’t think I’ve been that good at doing that.”

Where do you go from here? Has going to these kinds of extremes shown you that the next record could be a trance record or a metal record or everything at once?

“Oh, 100 per cent. Anything is possible now. We did this record with James Ford and he was really good at making dreams come true in terms of certain songs and sonic ambitions that we had. I don’t think that many people really care what kind of band we are, sonically. We’re at a place where we’ve established the shape of our personality and our character to the point where it’s bigger than the sound that we make. It’s more about the heart.”

You’re ending the summer by playing Reading & Leeds on the same day as Lana Del Rey. You once said that you thought you could write “a really good tune” with her. Do you think you might find her in catering and make it happen?

“Yeah, I’m going to muscle my way past security and pitch the living fuck out of our band to her! I’m going to bring all my Lana Del Rey records for her to sign as well. No, I don’t really have any interest in pushing for anything in that kind of way. If it happens naturally, then it happens naturally. I’ve no expectations. She doesn’t need to do it, we don’t need to do it, it would just be nice for me as a fan.”

The last time you played Reading, you went viral for bringing young fan Dexter on stage to play guitar. Is he coming back this time?

“I think he’s in one of the flight cases on the way over right now! We met his mam actually, she was lovely as well. He’s shown us up on stage once already, so he doesn’t need to do that again.”

Do you have any real bucket list moments left?

“There are places I’d like to go: South America, the Balkans, I’d love to play Bosnia and Serbia. I’m 28 now and would like to write and publish a book of poetry before I’m 30. I’m thinking about the 30 marker now. I need to learn how to fucking drive, man. I don’t know how, do you?”

I do, but I live in London so it’s pointless. Do you think you’d make a good driver?

“I think I’m quite conscientious and aware of other people’s movements. That sounds dodgy, but I’m embarrassingly good at getting out of other people’s way. I’d probably be a careful driver, but the act of learning is a different thing. I also want to do a soundtrack for something and I’m really getting into production. There are a lot of artists that I’d like to write with, not in a collaborative way but just to be part of the process and watch them do their work. I’d love to work with Sega Bodega and Shygirl, but I’m in no rush for those things.”

‘Romance’ is released on August 23, before the band perform at Reading & Leeds 2024 ahead of a full UK and Ireland tour. Visit here for tickets and information on Reading & Leeds, and here for the headline tour. 

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