F ew debuts in recent years have boasted an opening quite as striking as Big, the first track on Fontaines DC’s 2019 album Dogrel. One minute and 45 seconds of frantic double-time drumming, churning guitar and vocals mixed high and without reverb – so that it felt as if frontman Grian Chatten was shouting the lyrics about six inches away from your face – it announced the Dublin quintet as by far the most strident and exciting of the late 2010s wave of bands offering up post-punk topped with sprechgesang vocals: “My childhood was small,” Chatten kept shouting, “but I’m gonna be big.” It was a song you could have interpreted in a number of ways – an exploration of the band’s clearly complex relationship with the confines of their home town; a satire of naked ambition and unattainable dreams – but it couldn’t help sounding as if the one thing the band insisted it wasn’t: a statement of intent.
In fairness, their subsequent career hardly suggested a band eager to please. In 2020, their second album, A Hero’s Death, prickled with distrust at the fame Dogrel had brought them; 2022’s Skinty Fia was murky, demanding and largely funereally paced, yet it still made No 1. But, as if to underline that you never know quite what to expect from Fontaines DC, Skinty Fia’s follow-up makes you wonder if they have reconsidered Big’s statement of bullish ambition.
You would hesitate to call it a sunnier album than its predecessor – the first words you hear are.