“The idea of the title ['Starburster'] is about embracing the necessary delusion in terms of how to function [in everyday life]. I imagine it as a world within a snow globe, that you can slip into like a warm bath, but within that world is all the madness and the hysteria. It's about embracing that.”
“This album is about my fascination with falling in love at the end of the world: the album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.”
“We’ve always had this sense of idealism and romance. Each album gets further away from observing that through the lens of Ireland, as directly as ‘Dogrel‘. The second album is about that detachment, and the third is about Irishness dislocated in the diaspora. Now we look to where and what else there is to be romantic about.”
screwdriver_bar: oh buddy. what a night.
thanks to @fontainesband for dj’ing (tom and curley played a perfect screwdriver fitting set) and the band, crew and @arcticmonkeys for coming down and raging and shredding the night away. amazing times. biblical times. hand in glove fit. obviously we’re massive fans of both and was fun to point out all the shit from both bands in the bar like a game of wheres waldo. we swapped screwdriver stories with their rock n roll yarns from their history….plus records, bars, clothes, cities but mostly, a shared love of rock n roll. plus it was massive fun reliving and talking about one of our favorite seattle shows from audience vs stage perspective of that wild 1st monkeys show at the crocodile in 2006 when they were underage.
one of the most memorable nights in screw history, the stars certainly aligned and the rock angels and devils were cheering and weeping from above and below.
thank you @bangbangmaxwelledison for gifting the boys some deep 45’s theyll never find anywhere and always representing as an official ambassador / liason / party starter.
thanks to all who came down.
it certainly got a little dusty when screwdriver was declared their favorite rock n roll bar in the world. 😭
special shout out to grian’s crazy sparkly tracksuit that was passed around and end up on jamie in the photo (Seattle, 9/22/23)
i hate tiktok for making i love you by fontaines dc mainstream but at the same time, i’m glad they are finally getting the recognition they deserve and maybe be nominated for more awards cause they deserve it. when i saw them live, i fell in love with Grian i actually forgot i was there to see AM i was GOBSMACKED WITH HOW HOT HE IS. THIS IS THE MOMENT WHEN I FELL.
Had a dream last night that grian decided to do another AFK prank, where he would go to where a hermit was building in the shopping district and stand facing away from them.
Then, when they noticed him, they would go and see what he was doing! And the second they walked up to him he would
Slowly
Turn
Towards them
And everytime he had changed his skin to be slightly more and more creepy when he did. And then he would vanish.
Not like fly away or anything. It would look like he had just logged out, but he was still on the tab list. He was just GONE.
It eventually reached a point where he had done it to doc so many times that doc showed up on a stream, idk if it was his stream or someone else's, but he was talking about how 'grian was too good at being eldrich and creepy without even trying. It started with his scary backroom build and ever since he had just been the most casually horrifying thing on the server'
And then you heard grian go 'well that's not a very nice thing to say' and he just APPEARED behind doc and the man screamed
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 madness and 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.