Fontaines DC arrived in 2019 with Dogrel sounding like they'd swallowed Dublin whole — the streets, the rain, the resentment — and spat it back out as post-punk with a literary chip on its shoulder. Big and Boys in the Better Land set the terms: fierce, snotty, swaggering, and possessed of a remarkable sense of purpose for a debut. Hurricane Laughter showed the template in miniature: a relentless Krautrock riff think Can's Mother Sky turned up to 11, frantic guitars, vocals that somehow managed to feel laconic and forceful simultaneously. These were songs that announced a band, not just a sound. The pivot on A Hero's Death (2020) was weirder and more interesting than it gets credit for. The album registered the discomfort of sudden success — I Don't Belong, its opener, is an unflinching portrait of alienation and egotism on tour, music that broods and wrongfoots you by refusing the epic climax you're anticipating. Televised Mind, released ahead of the album, built its anxiety from a fuzzed-out Prodigy-influenced bass and corrosively distorted guitars. The band was already refusing to give listeners what they came for, which is a decent sign. Skinty Fia (2022) is where Fontaines DC became genuinely strange. The title track set muscular, funky rhythms under eerily gothic guitar and industrial noise; Nabokov closed the album in a maelstrom of guitars from the darker end of shoegaze, claustrophobic rather than dreamlike; Jackie Down the Line told an abusive relationship from the abuser's perspective with such infernally catchy melody that the chill takes a moment to land. But the album's centerpiece — and this list's number one — is I Love You, which begins gently Cure-ish and then just keeps building, ratcheting tension through a lengthy kick-drum interlude, until Chatten's open letter to Ireland arrives at "This island's run by sharks with children's bones stuck in their jaws." Five minutes that leaves you wrung out. Romance (2024) introduced Fontaines V2.0: image more striking, music more pop-facing. Starburster's monstrous beat, orchestral samples, and guitar twang resemble trip-hop retooled for a more fretful era, punctuated by panic-attack gasps. Death Kink wore the Pixies influence openly — string-bending lead guitar on the chorus, a wonky solo, abrupt ending. Favourite closed the album with a glorious, sunlit guitar jangle that could have been an indie disco floor-filler at virtually any point in the last 40 years — something nobody could have predicted from the band that made Dogrel. The Guardian's list makes a defensible case for I Love You at the top, and it's hard to argue. What's striking about the full 20 is how few filler entries there are across a six-year, four-album run — the band's evolution has been unusually purposeful, each album audibly reckoning with what the previous one cost them. With Dopamine Chamber (due October 2025 on XL) trailed as a bleaker counterpart to Romance, and the slow-motion synth chug of Marianne as its first single, the question isn't whether Fontaines DC have another gear. It's whether they'll use it to go somewhere nobody expected again.
