Fontaines D.C. Pen Conflicted Ode to Ireland on New Song ‘I Love You’
Fontaines D.C. have shared their new video for “I Love You,” the latest single off the Irish post-punk group’s upcoming third LP Skinty Fia.
In the Sam Taylor-directed video, singer Grian Chatten performs what he calls “the first overtly political song we’ve written” from inside a candle-lit church; the song weaves together spirituality with the guilt and pride of being an Irishman.
Skinty Fia, an Irish phrase which translates in English to “the damnation of the deer,” arrives April 22 via Partisan Records. Prior the LP’s release, Chatten gave Rolling Stone a track-by-track breakdown of the band’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2019’s Dogrel, including “I Love You.”
“It’s like the most normal title ever,” Chatten said. “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.”
Chatten 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.”
