Fontaines DC might just win the Mercury Prize with their worst record
OK, now I have your attention, allow me to clear something up. This is Fontaines DC’s worst album, but by no means does that make it a bad album. I simply have no other choice of words to definitely make my point, and therefore have been cornered into using the W word. This is, by all accounts, still an outrageously good record.
But is it better than Skinty Fia? It’s marginal, but the answer is certainly no. Is it better than Dogrel and A Hero’s Death? Slightly less marginal and even more certainly no. What it was, however, was the greatest campaign they had yet pulled off.
Let’s go right to the very beginning and more specifically, the album’s opening track, ‘Romance’. That alone might just be the best song the band have ever written and ushered in a dramatic new era upon which the album campaign could flourish. Bright green shellsuits, spiky hair dos, and an entirely caustic demeanour felt at home in this dramatic new landscape, ultimately allowing for an uncharted sense of confidence to exude from the band’s every step. Make no mistake, this was a band ready to seize the throne of indie immortality and become the band of our ages.
It was high time that a band of Fontaines DC’s calibre gained commercial traction and capitalised on this growing trend of internet-fuelled wildfires, which turned soundbites into memories. And refreshingly, rather than their music being the lynchpin of some obscure dance trend, it rightfully found its place in snapshot culture as music designed to sentimentality soundtrack reels and highlights. In an age of curated culture, that is as authentic as it will get.
It was a natural next step for the band’s discography, and moreover, the right one. But was it the best one? Not quite. Now, as I mentioned, this isn’t through any fault of the album but rather the undeniable brilliance of the preceding three records.
Dogrel was a post-punk shot in the arm, boasting the sort of lyrical genius you’d expect from a fourth Mercury Prize-nominated record. “Charisma is exquisite manipulation, and money is the sandpit of the soul” will forever remain one of music’s finest lines, and ‘Hurricane Laughter’ is still one of the most immersive live songs I’ve ever witnessed.
Then came A Hero’s Death, which took this raw and unfiltered model, and elevated it into something more acutely arranged. It had all of the raucousness of Dogrel, while opening the door to the sort of tenderness we would later enjoy on Romance. ‘Sunny’ and ‘A Lucid Dream’ feel like the two most obvious representations of this warring spectrum, yet feel outrageously intertwined in an album that seamlessly navigated these new ideas.
Then came Skinty Fia, which is artistically free as a record you’re likely to find. You’ve heard it all before, that their Irishness was embraced, but this extends beyond the simple adoption of Celtic soundscapes. No, the warts and all reality of their Irishness was embraced and challenged, on songs that were beautifully arranged and showcased just how easily this band could implement a 12-string guitar to their sonic palette.
Now, we have Romance, which is indisputably brilliant, especially in light of how it culminates all of the ideas of the previous records. They were boiled in a pot, and when the lid finally opened, an explosion of freshly executed ideas came with it. ‘Motorcycle Boy’ is a song written with the confidence established from Skinty Fia while ‘Death Kink’ only comes from understanding how punk ideas can be patiently executed.
But, while it is a truly stunning album, it just isn’t as good as the rest. And the reality of that, along with the growing trend of how Mercury-nominated albums have been previously chosen, raises questions over how much a campaign plays a role in the influence of the shortlist.
Regardless, this is one of music’s most important contemporary bands, who in this latest album run have publicly done away with classic tropes of masculinity in the rock space and more crucially, making their unwavering political stance clear in a time of dangerous artistic silencing. Should they step up and take the big prize in October, it will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the future of music, and for that, I won’t have any complaints.
