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What, then, lies post post-punk? When the wiry guitars begin to rust and snap and the sprechgesang grows duller than a Dry Cleaning shopping list recital? To their credit, Dublin’s Fontaines DC – pioneers of the recent, seemingly endless revival of the post-punk form – aren’t waiting around to find out. They’ve been gradually expanding, and decelerating, their sound ever since 2019’s frenetic debut Dogrel; by 2022’s third record Skinty Fia – their first UK No 1 – singer Grian Chatten’s dolorous Dublin poetry was washed with dark oceanic swells, accordion laments, and sparse chorales. Not so much a raging young James Joyce trapped in the basements of Temple Bar as the wailings and rumblings of a churlish captive from the bottom of Robert Smith’s dankest goth-pop well.
