Fontaines D.C. announce new single ‘I Love You’, arriving this week
The track, which the band have previewed at a number of recent gigs, is the second taster of 'Skinty Fia'
Fontaines D.C. are set to release a new single called ‘I Love You’ later this week.
The track, which the band have aired at a number of recent live shows, will follow ‘Jackie Down The Line’ in previewing third album ‘Skinty Fia’, due out on April 22 via Partisan.
Announced yesterday (February 14) to mark Valentine’s Day, Fontaines D.C. posted a short teaser of ‘I Love You’ on their social media accounts alongside the news that the full song will arrive on Thursday (February 17).
Get a taster of the new single below.
Reviewing the performance of ‘I Love You’ at the band’s recent intimate BRITs Week show at The Dome in Tufnell Park, London, Rolling Stone UK called it “a slow-burner of a thing that builds itself up to a powerful crescendo delivered with full gusto from Chatten.”
In a track-by-track guide to ‘Skinty Fia’ for Rolling Stone, Chatten described the motives behind the song, saying: “It’s like the most normal title ever. I wanted to write a song called ‘I Love You’ because I thought that it was a challenge that interested me to write a song about so kind of an ostensibly cliché topic and attempt to make it interesting and my own, unique. It just turned out to be another song about Ireland, of course. I kind of feel like it’s in two parts.
“Spiritually, there are two parts to it. I’m in a position there where I’ve made something of a career from trying to connect with and render the culture and country that I come from and try and express it and in turn and in doing so, understand it myself and help other people understand it. That’s what I think I’m doing.”
Chatten added: “I’ve moved from that country. I’m now living in a country that is responsible for a lot of the chaos in the country that I’m from, that still kind of looks down on that country. I feel guilty for having left. I feel like I’ve abandoned Ireland to some extent. Not that it can’t survive fine without me, but I feel like I’ve taken all this crap from it creatively, and then I’ve just left. I have this kind of strange feeling of guilt toward my leaving of Ireland.”
The band’s follow-up to 2020’s ‘A Hero’s Death’, ‘Skinty Fia’ is an Irish phrase which translates as “the damnation of the deer,” and a deer appears on the album’s artwork.
As a press release states, “‘A Hero’s Death’ documented the dislocation and disconnection the band felt as they traveled the globe on tour, on ‘Skinty Fia’ Fontaines D.C. are addressing their Irishness from afar as they recreate new lives for themselves elsewhere.”