Fontaines D.C. release brooding new single ‘I Love You’
The track is the latest from their third album ‘Skinty Fia’
Fontaines D.C. have released their new single ‘I Love You’.
The song, which the band performed for the first time at their headline show at Alexandra Palace in October, follows ‘Jackie Down The Line’ from third album ‘Skinty Fia’, which is arriving April 22.
The track is a sensitive albeit darker offering from the Dublin band, addressing various political themes. Notably, it references the 2017 discovery of 800 children in a mass grave at a former mother and baby home in Ireland. “This island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws,” frontman Grian Chatten sings.
The singer described it as “the first overtly political song we’ve written”.
You can listen to the full track below.
In a track-by-track guide to ‘Skinty Fia’ for Rolling Stone, Chatten described the meaning behind the song: “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.”
He continued: “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.”
‘Skinty Fia’ is an Irish phrase which translates as “the damnation of the deer,” and a deer appears on the album’s artwork.
Speaking further about the themes of the album, Chatten said: “A lot of it is revealing itself to me to be largely informed and influenced by Irishness existing in England, and mutating and becoming a new kind of culture in general.”