can THESE GUYS MAKE ROCK Bands COOL AGAIN ???

When FONTAINES D.C. were living in Dublin and making their first album, Dogrel, the five band members would pile into drummer Tom Coll's car and blast their freshly recorded songs through the speakers.

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This took some work: The car was so old that they had to connect their phones to an FM converter to create their own radio station, which the sound system could then tune in. The band's debut opens with a furious, hypnotic chant ("Dublin in the rain is mine / A pregnant city with a Catholic mind"), before doubling down on that sense of entitlement ("My childhood was small / But I'm gonna be BIG"). They would drive along one bank of the Liffey, the river that runs through the Irish capital, and back down the opposite side, playing the songs over and over again-a defiant unit, closed off from the outside world. "We were driving in a square; really, really high on our own genius," singer Grian Chatten says now, deadpan. "The system was so bad you couldn't tell that the demos were really bad."

It was 2018; they had just got an agent, signed their first record deal, and quit their jobs. But beneath the outward bravado, there was some self-awareness. After guitarist Conor Curley handed in his notice, he went to the café where his girlfriend worked to tell her the news. She said she was quitting too. "I was like, 'Oh, no, you should definitely keep your job.""

It's the humid crush of mid August, a week before the release of Fontaines' fourth album, Romance, and I've come to meet the band in Charleville-Mézières, a small town that sits between France's Champagne region and the Belgian border. They're in town for Le Cabaret Vert, a festival they first played back in 2018; three appearances here and as many albums later, they are now near the top of the bill.