It’s early May, and Warsaw — the tiny Polish community center turned Greenpoint venue — is packed to the brim. Fontaines D.C. is playing a surprise gig in the small, sweaty room, and before they’ve even struck an opening chord, fans are buzzing about the impending performance and chance to see the Dublin-born, London-based band play tracks from their then-unreleased album Romance live.

The band saunters on stage to the album’s title track “Romance” in all its haunting, distorted, sluggish majesty. The crowd howls as they appear, standing with a relaxed confidence saved for those effortlessly cool, stylish-without-trying individuals who are both too talented to avoid the limelight but not necessarily comfortable in its glare.

It’s the same energy I witnessed just two days earlier, first while chatting with guitarist Carlos O’Connell over coffee in a Williamsburg hotel lobby, then while speaking to vocalist and lyricist Grian Chattan as he smoked a cigarette on the patio. Both are dressed as if they’ve lifted their clothing from a the pages of a ‘90s rock-and-roll magazine, silver oval sunnies and timeless Adidas gear in tow.

Fans eagerly devoured “Starburster,” the band’s first single from Romance, when it dropped in April — a sinister, symphonic, spiraling track, with twinkling keys, bellowing drums and a viscous guitar part that kicks in after the words “it may feel bad” plays in the round. The words ”momentary blissness” repeated at the refrain have been stuck in my head ever since. Both dripping with ‘90s Brit Pop sensibilities and warnings of the post-punk future yet to come, the track was inspired by a panic attack Chattan had at a London tube station, his sharp inhales and sonic breaks in the track mirroring his inner distress. The lyrics are pristine and the production, led by James Ford (Blur and Arctic Monkeys) is peerless. Played live it hits you like a blaring, riotous, ton of cathartic bricks. It’s the post-punk the kids have been promised, realized.

Below, PAPER speaks to Chattan and O’Connell about Romance — the album and the idea — and how they birthed their fourth album into the world.

I read that the album centering around the idea that “romance is a place” — how did that become the theme that threaded the album together?

Carlos O’Connell: Grian [Chattan] had the idea of calling the album Romance, which I loved. I loved the simplicity of it and the vastness of the meaning. And then he had the song called “Romance.” He was playing it on guitar, sort of like an old school Elvis ballad. It wasn’t going to fit on the record like that, so we got into the room one day and to change it up and [our drummer Tom Coll] started with this percussion thing and I had my set up with my Mellotron and my keyboards and it would make this louder sound. It created such a dark atmosphere and that became a more central piece to the album than it was intended to be because the lyrics were so brilliant.

How was it working with James Ford in the studio?

Carlos: James is great. He works so hard. He’s always honest. He’s one of those people that just never switches off in a very calm way. You know, it’s like, we all like, need to switch off, you know? We all need to switch off. Anytime we’ve recorded albums we end up having really long nights of watching movies. And we went to France where there was no TV in sight so we were like “How are we going to do our movie nights here?” We actually bought a projector and set up a cinema and moved everything around in the main living room and connected the speaker to the main sound system there. There was a roll of white paper they had for photo shoots that I think [Arctic Moneys frontman] Alex Turner had bought when they recorded there. So, we set up this massive screen and ended up spending so much time in our cinema room.

What’d you watch?

Carlos: We watched a couple of the Pusher movies, these Danish movies. We watched quite a bit of Studio Ghilbi stuff. We have this thing of watching harrowing movies. Like on the last one Skinty we went this list of the most harrowing movies of all time. But anyways, James didn’t come by the cinema once. He just doesn’t stop. He’s superhuman. Very organized, very tidy which is important I think in the way he works musically. Everything is recorded is very tidy, from the very start of the process. What should be a rough take is already very tight. There’s no spill there’s no crazy cymbal sound. It really allows your ear to hear the space that hasn’t been worked on yet. That was the most interesting part of working with James, this patience and organization that allows you to in a very slow way. He just makes the space appear.

When you listen to the album there’s distortion and there’s noise but that musicality is still there. Did working with him allow the sound to be clean but still sound like yourselves?

Carlos: Yeah, exactly. It was very inspiring. My ideas kept flowing all the time. There always comes a time in an album where your ideas stop, there’s no more room for them. The way he works, everything so organized that there’s always room for another idea.

I read this great quote you had about digging into “what’s fantasy, what’s the tangible world, and what’s in your mind?” on the album. Where did the question come from for you?

Carlos: It’s a question of meaning ultimately. I guess as a band we’ve probably have asked that question all the time. The meaning of belonging, the meaning of not belonging. The meaning of being present or not. As things have gone our way and gone good, and life is suddenly, even through all the bottoms and depression made it hard to enjoy a lot of it for different people at different times. I have a big thing for luck. I think we are lucky. I very much respect luck it’s a thing that I don’t like to fuck with.

Don’t fuck with luck.

Carlos: No. I really believe it’s there, you know. And I believe it’s not entirely out of your hands. That’s why I really don’t like gambling. I get too obsessed with the idea that I can control it and ultimately that not the way we should work with luck. It’s a very delicate way of working it. So when everything goes well, you can say the tangible world is one that should be joyous. So, is the tangible world real or not? Because the joyous one doesn’t feel real to me and the depression in my head, that’s the only real one. And, in a way, the depression is fantasy. But maybe, it’s the total opposite. Real good things happening to the band and real life consequences and not being able to really appreciate it made me question the tangibility of things. Then I became a dad and [pauses as Grian shows up from upstairs, they embrace.] I became a dad, and the tangibility of that in insane. That’s the purest thing in the world, a baby. That’s totally real.

So you know that at least that is real.

Carlos: Yeah. Then at the same time that’s real for me. It’s not real for her, for my baby. She has to dream and I need her to feel like her dreaming is real. I don’t need to do that anymore because I have her. Love is fantasy, but it can be totally real. Being a dad made me very existential in a positive way. I’ve been existential since I was three years old. I watched The Neverending Story it made me have an existential crisis at five. Crazy movie. Shouldn’t really be shown to kids.

Atreyu getting into our heads. What was it about that movie that made you question things?

Carlos: There’s no escape from that never-ending thing. Just absolutely terrifying. So I think that movie is what made me existential. But then having a kid turned that into a really positive thing and it’s made me look back at everything. I definitely have been in a daydream my whole life. I struggled with the fact that I couldn’t believe in my daydream or live in my daydream. I want my daughter to be able to dream … to be able to live in that.

I wanted to ask you about “Horseness Is The Whatness,” the album’s oldest track. You wrote that in Spain, right?

Carlos: I was in Spain after recording Skinty Fia, and I was starting to see my partner now, the mother of my kid. It was very up and down and not working. And it going to a point of like this is over. And something I’ve done since forever, whenever I go through heartbreak I go somewhere on my own thinking that I’m gonna be fixed or happier. It usually is the total opposite. I did it here in New York years ago. I did in Paris, which is where I met my girlfriend now. I walked the width of Spain when I 18 because of it. And I ended up on a farm in Spain, and this one was the worst one because I’d developed a drinking habit. Usually those trips are quite pure for me. This time I was like I love drinking it’s great, I feel shit and then I don’t. So, I was on my own on a farm blasting hip hop and drinking loads of wine and i was gonna write an album. Obviously didn’t write anything. I sat in the sun all day and didn’t really use my internet. I read a few books and the last one I read was Still Life With Woodpecker and I loved the philosophy of life of the main character, outlaw. He puts a huge importance on word choice. A meaningful word is an important word. It must’ve been my second to last night there and I picked up my guitar again and those words came to me: “Understanding basics/ You’ll never let your guard down/ And always leave a card out.” I was heartbroken and cynical. I finished the song then I left.

What was the biggest difference in creating romance, in comparison to your last three albums? Did it come easier this time?

Carlos: It was hard but it ended up becoming actually easy in the process — we had always gone into the studio with albums 100% written. Barely any sort of creation happens in the studio. And with this album, we weren’t there at all. It was quite nerve-wracking. There were a lot of songs with no lyrics. There was a lot of songs with no structures. So the process was very different. There was a lot more writing still there so you have to get used to making decisions and sticking by them.

I’m excited to hear some of the songs live later this week. How do you hope people feel when they experience it in person?

Carlos: I’d love, even if it sounds a bit pretentious — and I’m telling you because someone said it to me the other day — and I said “That’s so amazing. I want everyone to feel like this.” I’d love for people to feel they’re 14 and they just discovered cool music for the first time. It’s good to feel like every record could function as a debut album.

I spoke to Carlos about this as well, but from your perspective, what was on the moment you knew the album was coming together?

Grian Chattan: Maybe 10 months ago, Carlos and I were texting songs that you have going on. I was walking through London by the Thames and he text me about a string arrangement for a song. I picked up the phone and was just like, “It’s happening, isnt’ it?” He probably didn’t tell you that’s the story …

I might of asked it a little differently. He said something about being experimental, and how “Favorite” came together.

Grian: We were doing a session in Maide Vale Studios in London, some stuff for Skinty Fia. We were in the hallway and Carlos is looking at his guitar and he showed me this chord progression and I start singing this melody. One of us took out our phone and we put the initial melody down. And that was the spark for how that song came about. There’s this new approach that started happening around that time. This openness and letting go and letting songs be nice melodies before we complicated them with lyrics and arrangements. It felt like there was a beating hear to this song.

We also talked about this idea of romance, and how you came up with that idea. Why was it an important thread or theme for you?

Grian: I’ve always been interested in subverting feelings. As soon as the industrial or futuristic side of the songs started to rear their head to call something that was going to sound like that [Romance] … it’s such a classic Hollywood title. It seemed fitting to me and exciting. The idea of a smoky metropolitan city, robotic, neon shit and then calling it Romance. That’s how it came about.

I did read about the lead up to the album and looking away from Ireland for a theme, do you think Romance came about because of touring? What was the experience that pushed you towards this idea?

Grian: We had a fair bit of time off, roughly six months which is more than we’re used to. We were able to absorb the environment of [London]… all of the inner workings and the mechanisms that make a city function. I like the idea of this large scale thing and we’re all ants dwarfed by it. I think those feelings happens. I watched a lot of movies. Got really into a lot of cinema. I really liked Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets have you seen that?

I haven’t.

Grian: Akira, that’s a big one for me. Some Love Death + Robots as well. Our inspiration on the record in general was a lot more futurism. This idea made it’s way into our subconscious. Musically, Sega Bodega, Eartheater. Did you go to Coachella?

I did but I missed Eatheater, I was backstage most of the time doing interviews.

Grian: I’ve never seen her live. But all of these influences have this almost doom like quality of where humanity may go. And the question of whether or not human frailty will persist and still be around.

That makes sense with the quote I read that you had about the album. This idea around “falling in love at the end of the world” and protecting this tiny flame and keeping it alive. Could you have written about this idea or theme at any other point in your life?

Grian: I don’t know. The social and political affairs in the world — we’re engulfed by them with social media it’s such intense discourse. It’s a 360-degree angle 24/7, and it can be difficult to go home and put the kettle on and ask your partner if they want a cup of tea, and I feel it. Those moments become more and more maybe nuanced against the backdrop of the — I don’t want to say dystopia because I sound like I’m in college smoking a joint. But yeah, it made those moments all the more powerful.

I wanted to ask about the lead single “Starburster” and this idea of permanently documenting a really vulnerable and personal experience? What is that allows you or drives you to be able to do that?

Grian: What drives it for me is the same old thing, and I find it really fun at the moment when I’m doing it. I don’t think about its application or its release or anything until much later when I have to. When I see the reaction flicker across the faces of the rest of the guys the band. When I wrote the lyrics to that song, I was trying to feel better, trying to turn that turmoil into something witty and funny or provocative to loosen this sense of immobility that comes with it or inertia… just trying to move.

Four albums in, working together as a band, having everyone bringing their own inspiration and with a new level of confidence — how did that translate into recording?

Grian: By the time we got into the studio, we had luckily achieved a deep understanding of what the whole record was supposed to do. And James Ford is a really good communicator. He’s a really good receptor as well. He understood the task at hand really quickly which is impressive cause we can go on. I remember banging the desk at one point and like “I want to get a cinema out of this thing James,” he found that stuff really funny.

What was the moment in the studio where you knew it was all coming together?

Grian: it was actually when I made the demo for “In The Modern World,” in my flat. I got to the chorus, and when it kicked in, I don’t know exactly what it was. When it happened i remember pausing and leaning back and being like, fuck. Then in the studio when I first heard the drones on “Starburster.” We were all like, “this has gone well.”

I asked Carlos this too, but how do you want the album to feel when people get to experience it?

Grian: I want it to feel really immersive and cinematic. I try and avoid the word cinematic as much as possible. I really want it to feel like you’re stepping into something as opposed to us hopping on stage and there’s an assault of music and moving around. I want it to feel like you stepped into a snow globe. Our snow globe.

Photography: Theo Cottle