Vinyl Record

Fontaines D.C. - Romance

Fontaines D.C. - Romance on LP vinyl. A 2024 record available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel, Ireland.

LP · 2024

Available from Kilmorna Collection in Listowel.

Buyer notes: 2024 LP, currently available from the Kilmorna Collection vinyl shelf. Pay for pickup in Listowel or ship within Ireland for EUR 5.50.

Romance is Fontaines D.C. stepping out of the narrow room people had built around them. Released in 2024, the album marks their first full-length with XL Recordings and their first with producer James Ford, but the more important change is imaginative. The band keep the intensity that made Dogrel, A Hero's Death and Skinty Fia matter, then redirect it toward desire, apocalypse, fantasy, glamour, dread and a wider sonic vocabulary. The title track opens like a transmission from a damaged future, setting up an album where love is less comfort than resistance. Starburster is the obvious rupture: breathless, swaggering, strange, built around panic and charisma. Here's the Thing and Death Kink retain the band's bite, while Desire, In the Modern World and Sundowner lean into a more widescreen ache. Bug, Motorcycle Boy, Horseness Is the Whatness and Favourite show how far the band can move from their early post-punk template without losing their nervous signature. Romance works because it treats expansion as risk rather than decoration. The sounds are bigger and more varied, but the writing still has Fontaines D.C.'s habit of turning private feeling into atmosphere. The album asks whether love can mean anything when the world feels unstable, and then answers by making instability sound vivid, seductive and alive.

Romance matters because it is the band's clearest reinvention to date. It shows Fontaines D.C. refusing to become custodians of their own early sound, instead building a more ambitious rock record around texture, image and emotional scale. For a 2020s guitar-music collection, it is a defining step: a post-punk-associated band moving toward something broader without sanding away danger.

This is the Fontaines D.C. title for collectors who want the bold pivot. Dogrel has the debut charge and Skinty Fia has the dark identity work, but Romance is the album that opens the windows and lets in neon, distortion, dread and pop-facing melody. It belongs beside modern rock records where a band grows more accessible and stranger at the same time.

Expansive modern rock with post-punk tension, electronic sheen, breathless vocals, romantic dread, widescreen melodies and a futuristic sense of unease.

Recommended for: Fontaines D.C. fans following the band's reinvention; Collectors of major 2020s alternative rock albums; Listeners who like guitar bands expanding into bigger sonic worlds.

What year was Romance released? Romance was released in 2024. What changed on Romance? The band broadened its sound with more varied textures, a larger emotional scale and a less strictly post-punk frame. Which tracks are the best entry points? Starburster, Romance, In the Modern World, Favourite and Death Kink show the album's range.