Fontaines D.C. have shared a new track & video “I Love You”, the second song to emerge from forthcoming new album Skinty Fia, out on April 22nd via Partisan Records.
Ostensibly a love song, “I Love You” is layered, impressionistic and infused with the band’s trademark intensity. Stitched into the apparently ardent lyrics is a lament for Ireland, in what Fontaines D.C frontman Grian Chatten describes as “the first overtly political song we’ve written.” Written from the perspective of an Irishman abroad, the song unravels to reveal a passionate sense of self-loathing. The lyrics detail the guilt of a barroom reveler, enjoying great personal success and a sense of cultural pride, while simultaneously metabolizing deep disappointment, and swirling anger, at the current political climate as well as the country’s grimmest historical atrocities, such as the decades of tragic brutality at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway: “This island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws.”
The cinematic music video, directed by Sam Taylor, captures the song’s building intensity. He elaborates: “It’s standing in the centre of our beloved home country as a multitude of things are brought to tragic ends in an apocalyptic state of affairs. That’s how it feels to me, and what I felt when I wrote it.”
Listen to “I Love You” and watch the video for it below: