Every week, Consequence's The Songs of the Week column looks at the best new songs of the past seven days and the most notable releases. Find our new favorites and more in our The best songs on Spotify playlist and other great songs from emerging artists, check out our New Spotify sounds Playlist. This week, Fontaines DC embarks on a colossal new chapter.
Fontaines DC's Grian Chatten proclaimed a self-fulfilling prophecy on the opening track of her edgy debut, Dog: “I'm going to be big“He shouted, his voice cutting through the album’s caustic production. Romancehis new chameleonic album, the prophecy has been fulfilled.
Now, they’re under the big sky, drowning in reverb and wading through space. With “In the Modern World,” the album’s final single and one of the band’s grandest ballads, they take it all in. “I feel alive/ In the city/ That you like,” Chatten begins in a whispery croon, his powder keg baritone made more potent by the song’s open atmosphere. Throughout the song, Chatten is both alive and nothing; he concludes, “In the modern world/ I don’t feel bad.”
There’s a lot to be learned from that “I don’t feel bad,” which Chatten sings with a hint of uncertainty. Being young and in love in the city is a liberating but numbing experience. But the arrangement of “In the Modern World” is far from numbing. The strings, courtesy of super-producer James Ford, certainly help the song’s air of tearful romance. Like all Fontaines DC songs, the track simmers, bleeds, and boils. Where before they took that tension and maximized it like shaking a soda can, now the song becomes more tedious. Hound Days later, the hard-fought victory of “Death of a Hero”: they let the tension dissipate into the sky and what remained was melancholy.
They swore they would be big, and now they are truly gigantic: in sound, in scope, in ambition. Chatten may say he feels nothing, but it’s hard not to feel his passion throughout “In the Modern World.” Being down has rarely sounded so moving.
— Paul Ragusa
Associate Editor
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