Fontaines D.C.’s fourth album, Romance, came out in August 2024 and marked the most deliberate sonic departure the Dublin band had attempted. The guitars are less prominent, the production more textured, and the general atmosphere further from the post-punk minimalism of their debut than anything they had previously released. Whether that constitutes growth or drift is a question the record itself declines to answer.

The band’s first three albums moved along a reasonably clear trajectory. Dogrel in 2019 was raw and charged with the energy of a group that had been playing the same set for years before anyone outside Dublin knew who they were. A Hero’s Death in 2020 slowed things down deliberately, as if testing whether the audience would follow them into quieter territory. Skinty Fia in 2022 was their most assured work, a meditation on Irish identity and dislocation that felt like a band arriving at something.

Romance attempts something different. The production, handled by James Ford, pulls toward a more polished sound than the band has worked in before. There are synthesizers and more prominent bass lines and a general willingness to let things be bigger and louder in a different register than punk. Some of it works. The title track is one of the better songs they have written. Other moments feel like the band deciding what they want to be before they have fully figured out what that sounds like.

It is a transitional record in the best and worst senses of that phrase. The next thing they make will determine whether this was a step toward something or a detour.