Skinty Fia’s distinction comes from its cohesion, lacking the noticeably different styles of Fontaines D.C.’s first two albums.
Fontaines D.C.’s debut album Dogrel was my top album of 2019. Their sophomore album A Hero’s Death was just as good, and made my top albums list in 2020. This set the bar very high for their third album, which is right around when most bands try to change things up. If a debut album introduces a band’s “sound,” and its follow-up solidifies it (with minor tweaks), the third album is the critical point where a band shows they are not a one-trick pony. Think of Arcade Fire going for an expansive concept album with The Suburbs or Interpol adding synthesizer to Our Love to Admire.
Skinty Fia’s distinction comes from its cohesion, lacking the noticeably different styles of Fontaines D.C.’s first two albums. While Dogrel and A Hero’s Death hinted at a band trying their hand at different techniques to see what worked, Skinty Fia has the confidence to commit and say “this is Fontaines D.C. now.”
The most immediately audible trait of Skinty Fia is how dark it sounds, and it’s accurate to describe it as a gothic rock album. This isn’t all that surprising, considering the number of tracks on A Hero’s Death that really leaned into the Joy Division side of post-punk, but it’s a little jarring to hear a whole album’s worth of it. While I know there’s no worse cliché than to bring up Interpol after mentioning Joy Division, several tracks on Skinty Fia immediately brought those New York rockers to mind. This isn’t so much because singer Grian Chatten sings in a low monotone (though admittedly, he does at times), but because the guitar and bass lines on the tracks “Big Shot,” “How Cold Love Is,” and “Roman Holiday” are dead ringers for Interpol’s melodies. Elsewhere, “Bloomsday,” “Nabokov,” and the title track have enough hazy guitar, reverb, and markedly deep vocals to echo the shoegaze goth of the Horrors. The band pulls off this gloomy and bleak style quite well, although the complete lack of anything upbeat may weigh on you after a while.
Despite this common theme of dreariness, Skinty Fia is hardly a one-note album. The lead single “Jackie Down the Line” distinguishes itself by having snappy snares that fill it with pep, along with higher-pitched guitar chords and backing “sha-la-la’s.” Ironically, it pairs the album’s liveliest melody with lyrics like: “I will wear you down in time, I will hurt you, I’ll desert you.” It’s a great track, and falls somewhere between the Smiths and the Stone Roses with its jangle pop character. While this track is notable for these positive reasons, “The Couple Across the Way” sticks out for its peculiarity. It consists of nothing but Chatten’s vocals and an accordion, making its four minutes feel much longer. Although Chatten’s tale of an older, bickering couple is somewhat intriguing, it’s a bit of a slog that really feels out of place.
The up-front Irishness of the band, found throughout Dogrel, might have taken a break on A Hero’s Death, but it’s back with a vengeance on Skinty Fia. Despite the “D.C.” in their name standing for “Dublin City,” the band has since relocated to London, where they felt like outsiders. This made strongly seize their own sense of Irishness. To start, the album’s title is an old Irish curse that vaguely translates to “the damnation of the deer.” The opening track “In ár gCroíthe go deo” is Irish Gaelic for “in our hearts forever,” and alludes to a recent story of an Irish woman in the UK who was not allowed to use this language on her tombstone because it could be seen as a “political statement.” The track itself creates an ominous start to the album, as the band’s backing vocalists chant “In ár gCroíthe” like a church choir throughout the song. “I Love You” has an innocuous title, but is really the band’s most political song to date as it reveals their conflicted feelings towards the Emerald Isle. The track’s first half is full of coddling overtures delivered in a heartfelt matter, before it explodes into condemnations like “this island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws.” If nothing else, it stands out for its mercurial attitude.
Nearly all of the tracks on Skinty Fia are incredibly well done, and Fontaines D.C. prove themselves amazingly deft at crafting their own unique sound on the album. That said, its even-keeled nature makes it much stronger as a whole than when the album broken down into its individual tracks. Previous albums had songs that ranged from “the slow, pensive one” to “the riotous, punchy one,” while Skinty Fia ranges from “the dark, brooding one” the “the darker, brooding one.” If this is indeed the sound of Fontaines D.C. to come, it should be welcomed, given the band’s aptitude, but you may still miss when the gloom was balanced with brightness.
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