The Grammys are pretty useless, as we know, but the one good thing about it is learning about new bands or songs that may have slipped under the radar. In 2025, the Best Rock album category featured the expected nominations for Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones, Green Day, Jack White and the Black Crowes, all established acts for decades. <\/p>\n
Also nominated was Fontaines D.C. for their fourth album Romance<\/i>, and in a just world, it would have been a contender for the title. The Irish band builds on its cooled post-punk past with dashes of rock, hip-hop and pop smarts, sounding confident and engaged throughout the brisk 37-minute runtime. <\/p>\n
The best song on the album, and one of the best songs of 2024, is \u201cHere\u2019s The Thing.\u201d A guitar squall and a busy drum fill introduce the track, with Grian Chatten\u2019s voice alternating between falsetto in the chorus and detached observer in the verses (which drop the guitars completely and let the bass and drums do the talking). It\u2019s a propulsive headrush of a track that gets in and out in less than three minutes and will be a mainstay on your playlist.<\/p>\n
Equally of note is \u201cStarburster,\u201d which infuses hip-hop rhythms and speak-singing with spaghetti Western guitar and a general unpredictability, even after you\u2019ve heard it a few times. These two songs together suggest a band that refuses to be pigeonholed and continues to evolve.<\/p>\n
This sort of brilliance is hard to maintain on an entire album, but even the slower songs like \u201cDesire\u201d and especially \u201cIn The Modern World\u201d maintain an effortless grandeur. The dreary opening title track seems almost like a goodbye to the band\u2019s past; you think you\u2019re in for a moody tone poem about bad love, but as soon as it ends \u201cStarburster\u201d kicks things into gear. <\/p>\n
Things do hit a snag toward the end with the rather dull (by comparison) \u201cMotorcycle Boy,\u201d \u201cSundowner\u201d and \u201cHorseness Is The Whatness,\u201d which calls to mind Oasis when they slowed things down to sound serious on Be Here Now<\/i>. But the album\u2019s pacing is otherwise flawless, moving between the faster and slower tracks, leading into the bracing penultimate two-minute \u201cDeath Kink,\u201d with Chatten shouting off-key and the band barely keeping it together. Things close with the jangle-power-pop of \u201cFavourite,\u201d a hopeful and expansive-sounding track that made it on several year-end best-of lists. Its sweet nature is the opposite of \u201cStarburster,\u201d but it gets under your skin the same way.<\/p>\n
With a lesser band, this sort of stylistic variance could sound desperate, but the self-assurance and economical nature of the music feels at once vibrant and necessary. They\u2019ve moved on beyond their post-punk start and their Irish roots, hinting at bigger themes with a broad color palette of sound.<\/p>\n
To nobody\u2019s surprise, the Stones won the Best Rock Grammy in 2025, because the Grammy rock voters either didn\u2019t actually listen to the albums or were all born in 1954. But if they had, they would certainly have rated Romance <\/i>higher. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":35257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[11070],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-47143","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-fontaines-dc","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47143"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}