Fontaines D.C. are currently promoting their new album, A Hero’s Death, but the success of their debut album Dogrel did not result in plain sailing for the band.
"When the record came out and it was in the Top 10 it didn’t mean we started making more money or anything like that, or living differently," guitarist Carlos O’Connell recalls in an interview in The Guardian.
"When you’re a band releasing your first album you get all this attention but then there are certain things that make no sense with it, like you’re completely struggling for cash throughout this massive tour. It shows how fragile it all is."
There were accompanying tensions between band members. Singer and lyric-writer Grian Chatten recalls being in "the throes of a particularly negative tour of Europe. I think I’d just said goodbye to my girlfriend and we hopped in the van and no one was talking with each other."
"We all had this pent-up aggression and resentment, and me and Carlos sat in the back of the van and just started holding hands for half-an-hour without saying anything. And in flooded the humanity again. The van filled up with that old romance that we lost without realising. That became a fertile ground for creativity."
The new album does not deliberately conjure a Dublin locale as Dogrel managed to do in its cumulative effect. "There’s a level of specificity and locale on the first album that we could have aped, but it would have been fraudulent and thereby useless as a piece of art," Chatten says. "So I think that we wrote about the places within as opposed to the places without."
