In the middle of their current tour, bassist Connor Deegan connects with RANGE via Zoom from his hotel room in Portland. Deegan calls the band’s recent surge “pretty amazing,” and has noticed a change in the way crowds react to their newer material. “I’m very interested in the way people move their bodies to the songs, as opposed to the way they’d move to the old ones,” he says. “We all really want to pursue that kind of effect on people, because they don’t move in the same way [they used to]. They move their body in this very nice, groovy sway.”

Musically, Fontaines have undergone a transition from the raw punk energy of their early career to more lush and diverse offerings. Having written the demos for A Hero’s Death during a gruelling touring cycle, Skinty Fia’s demos were largely written during lockdown. As pandemic life started sinking in more with each passing month, the band found themselves with more time to sharpen their production skills. “The quality of our home demos that we made ourselves before we even got to work with Dan Carey, our producer, was much, much higher,” Deegan adds. “It led to us having a more definite vision of what we wanted our individual instruments and songs to sound like. We got to try some fairly weird stuff in a practical way, just from having the time to experiment.”

“I’m very interested in the way people move their bodies to the songs.”

The band’s new penchant for experimentation has come hand in hand with their improved production knowledge. For example, Skinty Fia’s title track was based on a jam they later chopped up into separate sections (chorus, verses, etc.) to cut and paste and then figure out how to play afterward. Deegan considers this a “novel approach” for the band, as they used these production techniques as a writing tool. 

Another track clearly borne of the band’s new mindset is “Roman Holiday,” which features Deegan whistling alongside a high piano note during the bridge—a motif inspired by Elis Regina’s cover of “Águas de março”, a classic Bossa nova tune by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Another one of the song’s musical guideposts? Post Malone’s “White Iverson.”

The song is also part of a contingent of newer tunes that carry a strong Britpop influence at times, the echoey, reverb-heavy psychedelia becoming somewhat symbolic of the band’s recent move from Ireland to Britain. “It’s kind of our last hurrah with Dublin,” he says. “We’d all gone off and done our individual lockdown isolations at the start of 2020. I’d gone to a cottage in the west of Ireland… Around May to July, we all returned to our apartments in Dublin. We were living in a city that was opening up again just a little bit. It was a time of hope. The weather was very nice in Dublin, surprisingly. It was quite peaceful, and there was a sense of relief and joy in the city. I felt much younger than my age, because I had this sense of freedom, roaming around the city and getting to go out again… The fact that we could go down to the beach in the summertime and be together was very affecting and sentimental.”