Among our household names, Fontaines D.C. ranks near the top, a band we never tire of scribbling about. When my press pass request for their stop at The Fillmore Philadelphia was accepted, it felt like another chance to trace my journey with them. From listening to them on their early days to now seeing them once more as an international phenomenon, I watched closely, not wanting to miss a flicker of light, a single beat, or the electric current bouncing between the stage and the fans.
Those early days of their modest Irish debut now feel like fragments from another band’s history. In a few short years, Fontaines D.C. has pulled in listeners who wouldn’t usually touch post-punk, not by smoothing out the edges of the genre or chasing digestible hits, but through a raw honesty and deliberate intent. With Romance, they’re at their sharpest: confident, restless, and brave. It’s not just in the tracklist, the shift plays out on stage too. Their old grit is still there, but now it’s wrapped in a Y2K haze, like grunge reimagined through Marc Jacobs’ lens. Sleek. Defiant. Always a little unpredictable.
The set was a balanced mix of Romance tracks and old favorites, a culmination of Fontaines D.C.'s milestone tracks. Acts like “Favourite” and “Starburster” (which are also my favorite tracks of the album) was so charged that it made their studio counterparts seem like drafts. I let you do the guessing on how coked-up the performances felt. Watching the crowd, dancing, lobbing empty pint glasses, soft-moshing like it was some kind of ritual, I couldn’t help but think: this has to be the part bands live for, right? If that’s true, Fontaines D.C. probably left The Fillmore with enough satisfaction to last a few years. Their connection with the crowd was magnetic, stretching the room’s dimensions until it felt like we were witnessing something on a Prince-like scale.
The setup was stark, just a “FDC” banner and a Palestinian flag, but that minimalism felt deliberate. No distractions, just the raw bones of the performance. The lighting did the rest, shifting from moody washes to sudden bursts that matched the music’s surges and twists. Between songs, they kept chatter to a minimum, a shout of “Philadelphia!” here, a pointed “Free Palestine” there. The real dialogue was in the music, a call-and-response where everything ricocheted back from the crowd. It was a loop of energy, the band and audience feeding off each other during the whole entirety of the set.
They opened with “Too Real,” and from the first riff, which is one of the best ones on the album, the room exploded as if everybody has been waiting for that very moment. Midway through “Death Kink,” a mosh pit flickered to life, not unexpected for a Fontaines D.C. concert, sure. It was less "angry" than most mosh pit you'd see though. No elbows out, no annoyed side-eyes, no pushing and jumping over those who fall on the ground, just a shared current running through the crowd.
The encore was where the night tipped into something transcendent, the band’s evolution unfurling in vivid, undeniable colors, the band’s journey crystallizing in real-time. “I Love You” landed like a gut punch, Grian’s voice slicing through the haze, his repeated “I love you”s hanging in the air like an a confession, shared and understood by all. Then “Starburster” detonated, a final surge that turned what was already an energetic song into something even more asthmatic, more cathartic. It was an adrenalized sprint that felt like it was wired straight into the crowd’s nervous system. The song demands big spaces and head-banging bodies and it got both.
Fontaines D.C. never feel like they play to an audience, they play like they’ve wandered onto the stage to bare all, indifferent to the headcount. Four people or forty thousand, it wouldn’t make a difference. The rawness and the commitment never wavers. Away from pretense, they have a primal urgency that defies the need to do cartwheels on stage or engage in an overly-thought production gimmick. Whatever needs to be said, is right there on the stage, everything you need is laid bare, stripped down and made colossal. They strip it down to the bone and somehow make it feel massive. It’s a rare trick to be able to make a packed house feel like you’re all in on something personal, something singular.
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