After announcing several high-profile dates for the summer, including Reading and Leeds Festival, Best Kept Secret, and a slot at Sam Fender’s huge Finsbury Park gig next summer, Dublin’s own post-punk offering Fontaines D.C. have confirmed new music will be released next Tuesday (January 11th), as well as a promise that a new full-length LP will also come early in 2022.
Presumably titled ‘Skinty Fia’ the new single was shared to us via the band’s socials, in the form of a YouTube premiere, set for 6PM GMT on Tuesday 11th. This marks the first new studio recording since their sophomore album LP A Hero’s Death was released back in 2020, to solid critical and commercial acclaim. The popularity of the album lead to the band playing a huge headline show at London’s Alexandra Palace, where they would share the first of their first new material to the eagerly waiting fans. ‘I Love You’ begins nicely with its Johnny Marr-Esque jangly guitars, but by the end returns to the driving urgency the band have become known for. Watch a fan-shot video from the gig below.
During an interview with NME back in September, the band’s bassist Connor Deegan III explains, “The third album is really good,” which is a very good start, “We all thought the songs were quite poppy. We thought we’d got this sound that was finally the sound that we wanted to get across the songs, which we thought was quite poppy.” This could be good news, or bad news depending on what camp you sit in. But, “We showed them to our manager, and he said, ‘Lads, this is the darkest shit you’ve ever written!’ And we were like, ‘What? What are you talking about? This bass melody is catchy, this vocal melody is catchy’. He was just like, ‘No, this is extremely dark’. So there you go!”.
So whichever side of the fence you sit on regarding their possibly-pop-driven new direction, we know that it’s due soon after it was first confirmed to be pretty much finished back in March last year after a Reddit AMA with the band revealed “We just finished mixing the next record last week, sounding really great. It’s funny because we were so swept up with touring when we were writing a hero’s death, I think we only got a sense of what that record really is now.”
See here for the group’s full list of appearances in the summer.
