🎶I'm gon' hit your business if it's momentary blissness🎶

🎶I'm gon' hit your business if it's momentary blissness🎶

Endless list of the songs I play on repeat: Starburster - Fontaines D.C. (x)

Fontaines D.C. talk to Jack Saunders on BBC Radio 1's New Music show

Grian and Curley dropped by BBC Radio 1 to talk to Jack Saunders about the first single off their upcoming fourth album Romance, which comes out August 2024. I'll grab the audio clip once the broadcast of Jack's show is done. Sorry if this sounds like a blurb off the BBC site, I don't work for them but they should bloody consider that.

[On the lyrics to Fontaines D.C.'s first new single, 'Starburster']

Grian: "I felt a sense of immobility when I was writing these lyrics. I actually had the lyrics written, and was unsatisfied was them. I was on the way to record them and had a bit of a freak-out. I sat down and texted the producer James Ford and said, "I can't do this right now," I had to have it postponed. I sat down and just redid them because it wasn't what it was meant to be. And then it kind of came out in one go. It was sort of the experience of listening to yourself as opposed to expressing yourself."

[On the gasping breaths on Starburster, which Jack described as 'coming up for air']

Curley: I think working on this project breathed new life into us, we were excited to work on new sounds and go for it instead of being safe, which I don't think we've ever done, but on this one, we tried for it even harder.

Grian: You've got to take steps forward. Previously when we were releasing new music, we though that we might alienate some people with what we were going to release, but where in the past we may have thought that we didn't necessarily completely commit to the step, this time we did really jump.

[On the hip hop influence]

Grian: I was really into hip hop as a kid, and as you [Jack Saunders] mentioned, there's definitely a bit of a Gorillaz element to the production [the strings]. The focus came from a place of aggression and frustration, all the vowel sounds came out first and I had to figure out what the vowel sounds were.

[On the band's new aesthetic and bright coloured look, and 'finding light in a dark place']

Grian: The idea of the title is about embracing the necessary delusion in terms of how to function [in everyday life]. I imagine it as a world within a snowglobe, that you can slip into like a warm bath, but within that world is all the hysteria. It's about embracing that.

[On the album 'Romance']

Grian: We're releasing a new album, it's name is 'Romance'. That track [the snippet posted yesterday] is the opening track and it's also called Romance.

'Starburster' is BBC Radio 1's Hottest Record of the Week.

Update: Full interview

JACK WAS NOT KIDDING WHEN HE SAID THEY CAME DECKED OUT

I was not ready for this— Fontaines rockstar era, eh?

The band talked to Jack about this a little today, about very intense and grim music paired with the bright and intensely neon clothing. Jack said Grian and Curley were decked out in bright colours, though I have no idea what they were wearing, but they did talk a bit about how even Starburster the name is sort of them combatting bleakness with the colour, or something like that (I'll listen back to the interview later). This is looking like quite a deliberate departure from previous eras.