‘Starburster’: Unpacking the complex capitalist web of Fontaines D.C.’s masterpiece
The cynical crowd of the 21st century are always positing that there’s nothing new under the sun these days. But that’s hardly a shock: 120,000 songs were released every day in 2024, and now computers can create them in a matter of minutes, too. Thankfully, Dublin isn’t all that sunny, and Fontaines D.C. still have plenty of tricks up the flamboyant sleeves of their gaudy shell suits.
‘Starburster‘, for instance, saw the Irish group invoke an inhaler for the first instrumental chorus in history performed by a nebulising apparatus. Such savvy innovation allowed them to quickly rattle off the track of the year using two oscillating notes and a wad of swaggering boldness. But it was far from a simple song. Two easy core notes aside, there is a dense web of substance to the spitfire anthem.
‘Starburster’ is an enigmatic track puffing on a rolly behind a brutalist tower block. The mind of the inhaler is one of surreal anarchy. The words themselves breeze forth from the sketchy narrator in an abstract stream, every term chosen for its sharpness as much as its internal logic—symbolic of a protagonist who isn’t quite sure where that logic lies but is determined to make a spiky point no matter how indeterminate that may be.
”Stone” and ”bone” stand out from the get-go as harsh and stern statements. ”Bite”, ”shark”, and ”dark” follow suit as jagged syllables amid a cascade of quick-fire stabs. Everything is proverbially ‘edgy‘, but paradoxically, everything is also undefined—the pulsing drive of the protagonist is held back by one too many problems. Welcome to the modern age.
It’s an angry and volatile word vomit, confused and bedraggled by Grian Chatten’s expert design. The enigmatic protagonist is rightly confused, even uttering, “I may feel bad”. How can you not know if you even feel bad? And how can such a statement by quickly cast aside by bliss and a dreamy middle eighth? This conflicted state echoes the transcience between pleasure and bloody-nosed pain for the proletariat in the modern age.
We live in a time of “momentary blissness” in the form of a takeaway delivered to your door, a parcel you ordered mere hours ago arriving ahead of time, or a party providing reckless abandon, and the comedown of despair that follows each of these in the cash-strapped consumerist age that prompts the second act in the cycle, “I may feel bad”. Like the two notes in the song, we oscillate between these two poles indefinitely.
Though this might not be immediately evident in the song and the amazing accompanying video, directed by Aube Perrie, the band (and filmmaker) does a great job of pointing you towards such appraisals by capturing life in the outskirts of Dublin perfectly (or the ragged edges of any major city for that matter). In the busy song, the band blusters through the trademark doggrel of the rain-slicked streets of their home and buttresses this ramshackle spirit with the haunted disquiet of a collapsing culture.
It’s chaotic by nature because a collapse shouldn’t be ordered. it isn’t just the spat-out and sucked-up words that follow this method. All the instrumentation is roughshod over the same wheezing oscillation that runs throughout—finding beauty in the fluttering strings of a serene middle eighth before returning to the blows of dissonance and drudgery, capturing, in its own manic and infectious way, the contradictions of today’s working-class existence, where shallow pleasures, listless distractions, and profound longings pervade.
How do you make sense of today? Well, the person who explains that to you is going to need an inhaler to get through it. Thankfully, wise young Chatten has one to hand.
