Fontaines D.C. have announced their third album Skinty Fia, along with new single Jackie Down The Line.
The new album, which was produced by Dan Carey, will be released on April 22 and the band will perform the live debut of the first single on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon tomorrow.
The Grammy-nominated band, who consist of Carlos O'Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan III (bass guitar), Grian Chatten (vocals) and Tom Coll (drums), have had a meteoric rise over the past few years and have won acclaim for their two albums, 2020's A Hero’s Death and their 2019 debut Dogrel.
The video for Jackie Down The Line was directed by Irish director Hugh Mulhern, who has previously made promo videos for Inhaler, Kojaque, For Those I Love and also directed Fontaines’ video for A Hero’s Death.
This is Skinty Fia. The album we've been waiting to share with you for pretty much a year.
— Fontaines D.C. (@fontainesdublin) January 11, 2022
Sorry it’s not disco, we lied. It’s an album of terrible lows and even worse highs. We love yous all. Fontaines D.C. xhttps://t.co/jZcEKiUmmb pic.twitter.com/lrgmcFRmUv
Skinty Fia track list: In ár gCroíthe go deo, Big Shot, How Cold Love Is, Jackie Down The Line, Bloomsday, Roman Holiday, The Couple Across The Way, Skinty Fia, I Love You, and Nabokov.
Fontaines D.C. are set to play Iveagh Gardens in Dublin on July 2 and 3 this year and they have also announced a European and US tour for 2022.
Skinty Fia is an Irish phrase which translates to English as "the damnation of the deer" and the new album's cover art features a deer, plucked from its natural habitat and deposited in the hallway of a home, illuminated by an artificial red glow.
According to the band’s label, Partisan Records, "The Irish giant deer is an extinct species and the band’s thoughts on Irish identity are central to Skinty Fia.
"While Dogrel was littered with snapshots of the Dublin characters - like the cabbie in Boys In The Better Land - and A Hero’s Death documented the dislocation and disconnection the band felt as they travelled the globe on tour, on Skinty Fia, Fontaines D.C. are addressing their Irishness from afar as they recreate new lives for themselves elsewhere."
Speaking to the NME last September, the band revealed they had finished the recording of Skinty Fia in March 2021.
"The third album is really good," bassist Conor Deegan III said. "We all thought the songs were quite poppy. We thought we’d got this sound that was finally the sound that we wanted to get across the songs, which we thought was quite poppy.
"We showed them to our manager, and he said, 'Lads, this is the darkest s*** you’ve ever written!’ And we were like, 'What? What are you talking about? This bass melody is catchy, this vocal melody is catchy’. He was just like, ‘No, this is extremely dark’. So, there you go!"
