Forever in Their Hearts

Fontaines D.C. look at Irish identity from their new home in London

- DAVID CHIU

JUST PRIOR TO THEIR MOVE from Dublin to London a few years ago, the members of the Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. came across a newspaper story about Margaret Keane, a woman who was born in Ireland but lived in Coventry, England, for most of her life before her death in 2018. Keane’s family wanted her gravestone to carry the Gaelic inscription “In ár gCroíthe go deo” (“in our hearts forever”). However, the Church of England denied the request, arguing that the phrase could be viewed as political. To Fontaines D.C. singer and songwriter Grian Chatten, the incident was like staring down the barrel of a gun given the tensions between the Irish and British that have lasted for centuries. “We were just about to move to a country that regarded Irishness in and of itself as a political statement,” he tells Newsweek. “There’s not a differentiation between an expression of Irish culture and it being linked to terrorism or perceived as terrorism. That was a bit shocking and upsetting.”

The story inspired Fontaines D.C. to record “In ár gCroíthe go deo,” the six-minute dramatic opening track of the band’s new album, Skinty Fia, due out on April 22 via Partisan Records. A continuation of the band’s thoughtful yet explosive post-punk music since their remarkable debut, 2019’s Dogrel, Skinty Fia encapsulates the feelings of the five members of the band—Chatten, guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley, bassist Conor Deegan III and drummer Tom Coll—on what it means to be Irish while living in London due to the high cost of rent in Dublin.

“There is a spirit or a soul to the record more than a connecting theme,” Chatten says about