Dublin quintet Fontaines D.C. have been garnering buzz over the past year through their snarling post-punk meets garage rock singles and powerful live shows. After releasing a series of singles, last month the band signed with Brooklyn label Partisan Records to release their debut LP. But before the record drops, they’ve shared their fourth 7-inch and first with Partisan, “Too Real,” backed by “The Cuckoo is A-Callin” on the B-side. Our Song of the Day is the former, a rambling, bleak post-punk tune. Frontman Grian Chatten shared some insight behind the song:
“I’d been reading a lot of poetry, specifically Preludes by T.S. Eliot — he makes your mind drift off into romanticism, and then quickly snaps it back into reality — and I remember I shot out of my chair and wrote down just the first line (‘None can pull the passion loose from youth’s ungrateful hands’). Then when I came to the band with all the rough lyrics, our bassist Diego interpreted it as connecting to the sort of surrealist, idiosyncratic cyclical structure of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake — where the first line is immediately engaging, you’re dropped right into the story, and then the ending leads right back to the beginning again. That’s something we wanted to capture in the video as well, which begins and ends with a wake scene.
So the circular nature of the song and video reflect the circular nature of the book, but also in a sense the surreal repetition of life. I think something strange happens to your soul when you experience something that you’ve already experienced before. We’re always longing for every step in life to be a new, developmental one. To accept that some things stay the same, something cracks within. That’s where surrealism comes in. The song’s chorus is accusatory, and also we wanted to be able to look people in the eye from on stage and sing this to them.”
Fontaines D.C. just wrapped up their UK tour supporting Shame and are immediately diving into a solo UK and European tour before hopping to the US with their Partisan labelmates Idles. Seattle will be the very last date of their lengthy tour, on Tuesday, May 28 at Neumos. Watch the video for “Too Real” below.
