‘Chaos For The Fly’: Grian Chatten’s overlooked solo album
Far removed from the sneering bite of their debut album Dogrel, Fontaines DC‘s arena-filling supernova of a fourth album, Romance, has cemented them as one of the biggest bands of their generation.
Over the past seven years, the Dublin quintet have transformed their gritty brand of pub-born post-punk into a full-blown cultural phenomenon, one that culminated in crowds of over 45,000 revellers gathering to catch them at a string of gargantuan outdoor shows last summer.
Romance is an album which (rightly) took them from cult status to globetrotting superstars, and with such stardom, you would imagine that every aspect of their discography has already been carefully mapped, explored and dissected by fans. Any hint that singer Grian Chatten is in the same city as the Kneecap boys is enough to spark hopeful chants of “Grian, Grian, Grian” as the opening bars of ‘Better Way to Live’ begin to chime. Yet tucked between Skinty Fia and Romance is a record which seems, for the most part, to have quietly slipped under the radar: Chatten’s solo debut, Chaos For The Fly.
On this 2023 record, Chatten turned away from Fontaines D.C.’s kinetic brand of post-punk, leaning into a more intimate, Leonard Cohen-esque sound. While the band had relied on propulsive rhythms and jagged urgency to kickstart their ascension, Chaos For The Fly saw Chatten embrace his softer, folkier side, building an album around acoustic guitars, string arrangements and gentle, synthy textures. Peppered with immersive, wistful and emotionally precise tracks, the album explores human vulnerability and the quiet despair of small-town life, telling stories of windswept piers, tired casinos, old pint glasses, grief and loneliness.
Tracks like opener ‘The Score’ and closer ‘Season for Pain’ bubble with brooding, uneasy tension, while the fifth offering, ‘All of the People’, feels purely and deeply melancholic, with Chatten exposing a level of vulnerability he wasn’t willing, or able, to unlock through Fontaines.
The track is a bitter lament about the kind of false friends an up-and-coming rock star might encounter, written while touring Skinty Fia across America. “People are scum, I will say it again/ Don’t let anyone tell you they want to be your friend/ They just want to get close enough to take the final shot/ They will celebrate the things that make you who you’re not,” sings Chatten.
“It feels nearly embarrassing how crass and straightforward it is,” he told Annie Mac in an interview for The Irish Times, “But that’s just what came out of my mouth, and I trust the fact that I feel like that… I don’t really want to live with those feelings, so I needed to put them into music. I’m grateful to that song for doing what it did for me. I think it drew some poison from me, writing it.”
‘Salt Throwers Off a Truck’ stirs up such a potent sense of nostalgia that you can feel the bite of winter on your cheeks as you find yourself wandering through Central Park, coat collar up, throwing feed to the pigeons, as Chatten sings: “When February came, it came straight for New York/ Any colder, they said, we’d be skating to work /Salt throwers were taming the sidewalks with haste, til the whole of the city was seasoned to taste”. It feels both deeply lovely and oddly sad at the same time, like being trapped in a dream you know isn’t quite real.
‘Bob’s Casino’ and ‘Last Time Forever’ lean into a playful, wistful charm, where the former evokes the bittersweet jauntiness of a dance number from La La Land, while the latter layers clipped waltz rhythms with reverb to create a truly timeless sound.
In many ways, Chaos For The Fly was a signpost for what was to come on Romance: a slower, dreamier, more melancholy album, tempered by the band’s growing gift for crafting sharp, pop-inflected melodies. “I don’t have any desire to reach for the stars or the charts or anything like that,” Chatten told Annie Mac ahead of the record’s release, “I made this record because I feel like I have more of myself to say and to give. I probably will always feel like that, but I like the idea of casting a little light out into the darkness and seeing if anyone grabs on to it.”
Perhaps it was from the embers of that light that Chatten found the courage to shift gears on Romance, a glowing bridge from Skinty Fia’s ‘The Couple Across the Way’ to Romance’s ‘Favourite’, ‘Sundowner’ and ‘Desire’.
By using Chaos For The Fly to purge the poisons of fame from his veins, Grian cleared the way for Romance to flourish on its own terms as a giddy, neon-lit, and hedonistic offering, free of the darker shadowiness of his solo work. It seems fitting that the solo album closes with the line: “This is no season for loving, this is the season for pain”, while Romance begins by asking, “Maybe romance is a place”.
