Touring the States with Fontaines D.C., singer GRIAN CHATTEN lost the plot. Finding it again involved writing an “angry, bitter” song cycle based in an Irish seaside town. But is his first solo album a good or bad omen for his bandmates? “Things got very intense,” he tells TED KESSLER.

Eimear Lynch

IN THE AUTUMN OF 2022, GRIAN CHATTEN FELT ENGULFED BY A DARKNESS.

He’d spent months on the road that year touring Fontaines D.C.’s third album, Skinty Fia, but it wasn’t until the Irish quintet took their second six-week spin on the American carousel in September that their singer became worryingly unmoored.

“Things got very intense,” Chatten says now, sitting on the other side of the kitchen table in his new north London flat, a strapping, eloquent 27-year-old with a brooding air and tangy Dublin accent. “For personal reasons… my personal life started to break down.”

Circumstances did not allow for easy mind-clearing. Journeying vast distances to play his band’s intense music each night, he’d find himself afterwards battling insomnia in a different hotel lobby, drinking his way through the growing anxiety about his personal life while also navigating the politics of close-quarter group endeavour. Exhausted, Chatten decided to let the dread just wash over him.

“I made a conscious decision to close my eyes and jump into that darkness for a bit. It felt like swimming, so I immersed myself in it.”

Chatten is not the first young rock star to lose their mind on tour in the States, of course. It’s a routine earlycareer rite of passage, but Fontaines D.C. are not beginners. Their rise as one of the modern era’s most urgently dynamic bands since their debut Dogrel LP in 2019 has been vertiginous. Five outsider introverts who met at music college in Dublin’s Liberties area a decade ago, bonding over music, books and poetry, they threw these passions – the Beats, Joyce, the history of post-punk – into a trio of literate, left-of-centre rock albums, each not just critical hits but also ever bigger commercial successes. Skinty Fia was their first UK Number 1, making dents in charts across the world, and there had been several long US tours undertaken already. Nevertheless, this one smacked Chatten harder. “It became a closed-eyes experience,” he says.