Fontaines D.C.'s Grian Chatten explores a candlelit church in powerful video for 'I Love You'

Fontaines D.C. have released an ambient new video for 'I Love You', taken from their anticipated forthcoming third album Skinty Fia.

Ostensibly a love song, 'I Love You' is layered, impressionistic and infused with the band’s trademark intensity. Stitched into the apparently ardent lyrics is a lament for Ireland, in what Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten describes as “the first overtly political song we've written.”

“And I loved you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest, and I'll love you ‘til the grass around my gravestone is deceased"

Written from the perspective of an Irishman abroad, the song unravels to reveal a passionate sense of self-loathing. The lyrics detail the guilt of a barroom reveler, enjoying great personal success and a sense of cultural pride, while simultaneously metabolising deep disappointment, and swirling anger, at the current political climate as well as the country’s grimmest historical atrocities.

The decades of tragic brutality at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway are references: “This island's run by sharks with children's bones stuck in their jaws.”

The cinematic music video, directed by Sam Taylor, captures the song’s building intensity; Grian strolls through a serene, candle-lit church before intensely delivering the song’s second half directly to camera with characteristic gravity.

He elaborates, “It's standing in the centre of our beloved home country as a multitude of things are brought to tragic ends in an apocalyptic state of affairs. That's how it feels to me, and what I felt when I wrote it.”

'Skinty Fia' is an Irish phrase which translates to English as “the damnation of the deer” and the album’s cover art features a deer, plucked from its natural habitat and deposited in the hallway of a home, illuminated by an artificial red glow. The Irish giant deer is an extinct species and the band’s thoughts on Irish identity are central to Skinty Fia.

For a band whose hometown courses through their veins, the album finds them trying to resolve the need to broaden their horizons with the affection they still feel for the land and people they’ve left behind following a recent relocation to London.

There are echoes of Dogrel’s rumbustious rock ’n’ roll, and the bleaker atmospheres of A Hero’s Death, but Skinty Fia - the third in the triumvirate - is much more expansive and cinematic. A performance of Skinty Fia's first single 'Jackie Down The Line' was delivered recently on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, as the band debuted the track live for the very first time.

The post-punk rockers and BIMM Dublin grads will play homecoming shows at Dublin's Iveagh Gardens on July 2nd and 3rd, 2022.

Check out the cinematic video for 'I Love You' below:

Pre-order the album here.

Skinty Fia tracklist:

1. In ár gCroíthe go deo
2. Big Shot
3. How Cold Love Is
4. Jackie Down The Line
5. Bloomsday
6. Roman Holiday
7. The Couple Across The Way
8. Skinty Fia
9. I Love You
10. Nabokov