Fontaines DC and retro-futurist confusion

While the year in music that was 2024 will widely be remembered for Brat Summer, the rap beef of the century and the humanity’s overnight obsession with Chappell Roan; those clinging to the relevance of guitar music hailed another champion. Releasing their fourth studio album Romance, Fontaines DC garnered widespread critical acclaim as one of the few young bands of their genre with cultural capital and genuine talent. 

The album diverges from their previous dark post-punk sound towards a more diverse and energetic collection of songs. The pulsating anxiety of Starburster, shimmering guitar melodies on Favourite and the evidently Tik-Tok friendly catchiness of Bug all make for an album deserving of its praise. It is a work which excels in its application of the tried and tested formula of indie/ alternative songwriting and production. 

In the run up its release, however, the group looked markedly different. Lead singer Grian Chetton took to wearing a kilt, sunglasses and prominently placed hair clips. Guitarist Carlos O’Connell dyed his hair red and adorned similar Kurt Cobain-styled sunglasses to Grian. Bassist Connor Deegan took to styling his hair in pigtails, and the group generally began wearing outlandish primary coloured clothing in their promotional photoshoots. This new co-ordinated image marked a turn towards some quasi-futuristic aesthetic, one somewhat at odds with contemporary fashion. 

The group’s rhetoric during the album’s promotion seemed to offer some context to this shift in their visual aesthetic. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Grian Chetton spoke of a need to avoid being pigeonholed. Connor Deegan also referred to the album as a successful effort to create something new and fresh. When asked about the Oasis reunion, Deegan and O’Connell expressed their disinterest, with the former explaining:

“I just feel like we kind of got caught in the 2010s into such a nostalgic thing that we were forgetting to make new things. And I felt like what we wanted to do for this record anyway is like look into the future and make new things, so for Oasis to reform at this moment, for us, is really annoying”. 

Their frustration with musical nostalgia, striking visual aesthetics and discussions of efforts to innovate musically all point towards an album which breaks the mould in some way. It does beg the question, however, as to what makes Romance a ‘new thing’.  

While on the album’s fifth track In the modern world, Chetton bemoans his inability to “feel anything in the modern world”, the source of his disillusionment is never identified. What exactly it is that the group are rejecting here, in their efforts to innovate, remains illusive throughout the album. Despite its evident quality and deserved praise, the songs do not offer anything sonically distinct. The band have spoken of Starburster’s overt nu-metal influence, and while it offers a unique flavour, there is nothing new in its compositional, structural or melodic makeup. Here’s the Thing reiterates the strength of this influence, with a catchy vocal melody sang in falsetto alongside distorted guitar harmonics. In spite of its effectiveness, it is a work which could easily have been written in 2003. While the album is not merely a homage to nu-metal, its other influences are equally nostalgic. Sundowner is a work of shoegazing mastery, while Favourite is ostensibly a forgotten Cure single. 

In its entirety, Romance is an admirable effort to infuse these varied influences in a consistent and coherent manner. Each of these influences, however, harks back to a long bygone era. Despite Deegan's frustration with Oasis thwarting their efforts to innovate musically, there is nothing new at play here. In reality, Fontaines’ desire to move away from nostalgia has boiled down solely to some very strange haircuts. 

The absence of innovation in guitar music is nothing new, fellow claimants to their indie throne English Teacher often sound like a Sonic Youth tribute act, while Viagra Boys appear to be imitating Iggy Pop at times. In fact, guitar bands have been looking to the past for inspiration for at least twenty years. The mid-2000s mini-indie revival was largely made up of groups seeking to emulate Britpop, itself a regurgitation of musical and aesthetic elements of previous generations.

In this respect, Deegan’s comments about nostalgia in music are largely accurate. The point of confusion here stems from perceptions of how exactly musical change occurs. In answering that question, the emergence of popular music in the post-war era offers an insight. 

In the early 1950s, the technical innovation of the electric guitar offered a new conduit for performing the blues, resulting in rock and roll. As the era of Keynesian public spending established a robust middle class and economic stability, artistic expression was given greater freedom to develop. It is in this setting that the much-lauded musical revolution of the 1960s took place, with popular music taking shape in the form of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones among many others. By the early 1970s, the firm structure and hooky melodies of pop music had become the norm. Building upon this, progressive rock music prioritised instrumental virtuosity, incorporating long and meandering solos, unnecessary key changes and indulgent lyrical themes into this structure. During the latter years of this decade, a firm rejection of prog rock came about in the form of punk. The simple power chords, lack of instrumental diversity and rebellious lyrics deviated from the former subgenre in every way possible. 

This thirty-year period was a continual conversation in music from one generation to the next, instigated by material changes in technology and the economy. Rather than one group or individual knowingly instigating musical change, one form naturally gave way to another, which eventually grew stale and came to be rejected by many of the younger generation in their musical expression. 

Fontaines’ aspirations of rejecting nostalgia in favour of innovation highlights a strange cultural confusion. The aesthetics of their genre value rebellion and nonconformity. In the absence of any emerging subgenres or counter cultures in recent decades, however, their efforts to achieve this must hark back to indie music of the 1980s, shoegazing from the early 1990s and nu-metal music from the early 2000s. 

In this sense, 2024's version of Fontaine's DC proves that the current cultural landscape leaves few avenues open for creating “something new” in guitar music, aside from dying your hair red and wearing a kilt.