Fontaines D.C.’s ‘In the Modern World’ Is Song of the Week

Every week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week column looks at great new tunes from the last seven days and analyzes notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Fontaines D.C. embrace a colossal new chapter.

Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten proclaimed a self-fulfilling prophecy on the opening track of their nervy debut, Dogrel: “I’m gonna be big,” he barked, his voice cutting through the album’s caustic production. On Romance, their chameleonic new album, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

Now, they’re under the big sky, drowned in reverb, and wading through space. With “In the Modern World,” the album’s final single and one of the band’s more grandiose ballads, they take it all in. “I feel alive/ In the city/ That you like,” Chatten begins in a breathy croon, his powder keg baritone made more potent by the track’s open atmosphere. Throughout the song, Chatten is both alive and nothing; he arrives at the conclusion “In the modern world/ I don’t feel bad.”

There’s a lot to garner from that “I don’t feel bad,” which Chatten sings with a hint of uncertainty. To be young and in love in the city is a freeing-but-numbing experience. But “In the Modern World”‘s arrangement is far from numbing. The strings, courtesy of superproducer James Ford, certainly aid in the song’s air of weepy romance. Like every Fontaines D.C. song, the track simmers, bleeds, and boils over. Where they would once take that tension and maximize it like shaking a soda can — the Dogrel days, the harsh victory of “A Hero’s Death” — they let the tension dissipate into the sky, and what’s left is melancholy.

They swore they’d be big, and now, they’re truly gigantic — in sound, in scope, and in ambition. Chatten may say he doesn’t feel anything, but it’s hard not to feel his passion throughout “In the Modern World.” Being down rarely sounded this moving.

— Paolo Ragusa
Associate Editor