Carlos O’Connell sounds like a guy who took one look at the syllabus and walked out humming a Buddy Holly song. Fontaines D.C., the Dublin band that crash-landed into the post-punk zeitgeist with Dogrel, didn’t set out to become spokespeople for a city in crisis—but here they are, whether they like it or not.
“We all met in college, yeah,” O’Connell says, half amused and half wary. “But music school... it’s a lot of pretension, you know? Lectures trying to tell you what makes music better—like complexity is some kind of virtue. We just wanted to play rock and roll.”
And so they did—ramshackle, Ramones-style, Buddy Holly chords and all. Until they got bored. And when Fontaines gets bored, things shift.
“As we got deeper into writing, we started pushing those sonic boundaries. But we kept what we learned—kept it honest, kept it raw. We didn’t need all the academic crap.” Poetry replaced melody, or maybe melody made room for poetry. Either way, frontman Grian Chatten stopped trying to be a singer and started being a street prophet.
“Grian found a way to pour his lyrics onto a song without needing to marry them to melody. Suddenly, they were just poetry. And that gave us freedom.”
That freedom is all over Dogrel—a debut that feels less like a calling card and more like a declaration of war against the cultural erasure of their hometown. “We have love for Dublin,” O’Connell says. “But you can’t write about it honestly without acknowledging what’s wrong.”
And what’s wrong, according to Fontaines D.C., is disposable tourism, gentrification, and a city government that’s more interested in opening hotels than preserving cultural spaces. “It’s like the people who live here suddenly matter less than tourists. Venues disappear. Landmarks vanish. And for what?”
The record doesn’t wallow in nostalgia, though. It kicks and screams and sometimes slow dances in its frustration. Dublin City Sky, which closes the album, is a melancholic near-folk song in the spirit of The Dubliners. “We love those songs. And we figured—if we write something in that tradition, it doesn’t have to follow any trend. It just has to be real.”
And then there’s “Big”—the video stars a child swaggering around like a pint-sized Liam Gallagher, a visual metaphor that apparently took its star by surprise. “It was probably a lot of work for him,” Carlos laughs. “But I think he just got it. That sense of ambition—you’re gonna be something.”
Which makes sense, considering the band’s own brush with underdog status. Their breakout single “Boys in the Better Land” was originally a B-side, ignored by basically everyone when it first dropped. “We loved it,” Carlos says. “But when we released it with ‘Chequeless Reckless,’ that’s the one everyone latched onto. It’s fine though—every good song deserves a second life.”
For all the talk of poetry and grit, Fontaines D.C. still aren’t above surf guitar tones or nods to The Beach Boys. “Yeah, we’re big fans,” O’Connell says without flinching. “The Beach Boys and Velvet Underground—those are the two. Not exactly a typical combo, but that’s sort of the point.”
Where they’re going next is anyone’s guess. “We want to go anywhere. This record gave us that. No one can box us in now.” Even if they try, it’s hard to argue with a band who wrote their first record like a eulogy for the present. Or a love letter to what’s already slipping away.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
