Barely a year since their debut ‘Dogrel’ earned them a spot as one of the most acclaimed new bands of 2019, Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. will return with A Hero’s Death on 31st July via Partisan Records. Arriving battered and bruised – albeit beautiful – the album is anything but a re-hash of the swaggering energy from their first record. Instead, the music is patient, confident, and complex – a heady and philosophical take on the modern world and its great uncertainty.
Hear the album’s title track now, and watch the accompanying music video starring Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders) that takes the song’s hypnotic intensity and adds a sinister layer of surrealism. Listen/watch below:
To record A Hero’s Death, Fontaines D.C. rejoined producer Dan Carey (Black Midi, Bat For Lashes) in his London studio. Together they carved out a more restrained, spectral balladry that runs through a good portion of A Hero’s Death, citing influences from Suicide, The Beach Boys, and Leonard Cohen to others including Beach House, Broadcast, and Lee Hazlewood. With album art featuring a statue of the mythological Irish warrior Cúchulainn that stands in Dublin as a commemoration of the Easter Rising, there are layers to the phrase “A hero’s death.” The album serves as a conscious effort to subvert expectations, to challenge themselves and their listeners, and to sacrifice one identity in order to take on another – one that is fully their own.
