In January, Irish post-punk group Fontaines DC announced Skinty Fia, the follow-up to 2020’s A Hero’s Death that competed with Taylor Swift on the UK charts. They’ve been touring all over the place and building up anticipation by performing on The Tonight Show and releasing ominous music videos.
The band played Dublin last night, and covered The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” It sounds lighter and more colorful than any of their actual songs, which are often dystopian and bleak like Joy Division’s.
Their latest single “I Love You” was a five-minute detached love ballad that focused more on self-loathing than romance: “And if there was sunshine, it was never on me / So close, the rain, so pronounced is the pain.” In the video, he walks through a candlelit church while reckoning with politics: “It’s standing in the center 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,” vocalist Grian Chatten said about that song. Their rendition of the classic Cure track about intense infatuation is far away from those heavy topics, and instead bounces with hope and sweetness.
Watch the performance of “Just Like Heaven” above.
