“Shredding is an amazing thing to be able to do, but when you can really write a feeling with a melody, like Johnny Marr did so well, that’s the goal”: Conor Curley of Fontaines D.C. on his love of Deftones and why he’s writing riffs like a beginner

“It’s very nice to be in Total Guitar – I’ve always been a fan.” Conor Curley is sitting in a café near his London home. “In my mum’s attic, there’s a big stack of Total Guitar from when I was a teenager – I’ve held on to them.”

In the four years since TG last spoke to them, few – if any – guitar bands have had the same meteoric rise as Fontaines D.C.

In that time, the Irish quintet – vocalist Grian Chatten, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, bassist Conor Deegan III and drummer Tom Coll – have played hundreds of shows (including a US tour with Arctic Monkeys), scored a UK number one album with 2022’s Skinty Fia and even picked up a BRIT Award for Best International Act, inching them ever-closer to becoming household names.

This year? The now-London-based group headlined Glastonbury’s Park Stage, performed on the main stage at Reading and Leeds, and released their inspired fourth album Romance – a bold reimagining of the Fontaines’ core sound.

Later this year, two sold-out headline shows at London’s Alexandra Palace beckon, before they return to the city for a huge outdoor concert at Finsbury Park next summer. It’s quite the feat for a post-punk band whose debut album was released in 2019.

“I’ve been trying to write riffs that are like when you started playing guitar,” explains Curley. “It’s such an interesting thing to me, because you hear bands’ first records and they’ll have these riffs that sound so intuitive. They don’t sound laboured over from music knowledge or anything; it just sounds like they’re writing their feelings.”

Romance finds Fontaines D.C. embracing a number of new influences both contemporary and from years gone by. From the scuzzy alt-rock snarl of Death Kink to the Britpop hat-tip of Bug and the gorgeous ballad Horseness Is the Whatness, the band appear unafraid to tear apart their existing sound, writing as confidently as if they were composing a debut album.

These days, Curley admits that he hopes to “not be nailed down by trying to intellectualise the stuff that you’re playing,” but rather “trying to write feelings that end up being the sound.” This approach is clearly one that the guitarist found liberating: “That’s what I want to do for the rest of my career.”

So far, he’s on the right path. From the cinematic hip-hop-meets-Western sound of Starburster to the album’s colourful art direction, and outfits that wouldn’t look out of place in a cult anime film, it’s clear that the band have evolved since Skinty Fia. To achieve this new sonic identity, the guitarists reached for instruments outside of their comfort zone.

“For this album, me, Carlos and Grian all bought Mellotrons,” Curley says, “which became really prominent on a lot of the demos. When it came to trying to do that in the room, Carlos – because he’s an amazing keys player – took the reins on being the Mellotron player. So it ended up being one guitar and him on keys for the first time ever, which was very interesting.”

Despite fellow six-stringer Carlos moving to keys, Curley rebuffs the idea that the band are moving away from being a guitar group.

“We are a guitar band,” he reasons. “Trying to think of us as being anything else, I don’t think it makes any sense. The key to all the ideas is guitar.

“All the songs come from my voice notes of us playing acoustics together and jamming backstage, although, on this album, it would be us writing a chord progression and then being like, ‘Let’s take the guitar out, and move it onto Mellotron, or use the guitar in a different way’. But I still feel like the basis of the band is guitar-driven.”

Curley, a self-confessed “guitar-culture nerd”, craved new tones for Romance that would contrast the band’s earlier work, though his exploration led him back to a familiar influence.

“One of the ideas for this record was to not rely on such a reverb-y guitar sound. That changes how you play, and I was a lot more inspired by early 2000s, heavier rock music like Deftones. When we were teenagers, that was the big guitar sound, and it was exciting to have a more modern, digital feel, rather than the ‘in the room’-type sound that we’d been trying in the past.”

Explaining his love for the Sacramento alt-rock group, Curley adds: “I think that Steph Carpenter’s guitar playing is incredible. His mix of a hard rock sound with a shoegaze quality is perfect.”

Recent interviews from the Romance press rollout has seen the band name-drop another seemingly unlikely influence on their new material – that of nu-metal pioneers Korn. Would Curley consider playing a seven-string guitar in Fontaines?

“Oh, man,” he laughs, “I’d love to give it a go, but I don’t know if my style would suit that.” Elaborating on the band’s own, perhaps misquoted claims of influence, Curley suggests: “I think the Korn thing came from us listening to music before going on stage and getting hyped up.

“The sound of their records and their big songs is so alien. People listening to our music might think, ‘Oh, I don’t hear it’, but it’s more the idea of trying to push things into a new realm that inspired us.”

An eagerness to mix-up their sound required a new approach to writing and recording. Having recorded their first three albums with popular post-punk producer Dan Carey, the band opted to bring in renowned Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford for the Romance sessions.

But despite the new personnel behind the desk, Curley is hesitant to solely credit Ford with the band’s new direction.

“We kind of changed it up ourselves before we even worked with him,” admits Curley. “When we met James, he was open to what we wanted to do. He didn’t come in with a plan for our sound. I think he saw what we were doing, and then did what any good producer would do and helped enhance the direction that we were going for.”

Pre-production for the album took place in London, where the band “worked on the writing for four weeks, pretty much every day,” states Curley. “Then we had two days off, and we went over to Paris and then spent three weeks recording there.”

The band decamped to the none-more-picturesque La Frette – a chateau-based studio on the Parisian outskirts. “It’s an amazing, vibey place,” says Curley. “With it being a residential studio, you never really leave. Once you’re in the world of it, you’re just working on the record every day.”

First single Starburster was creative ground-zero for the band. Mellotron string sounds loop over Britpop-style big-beat drums while Chatten spouts quick-fire, spoken-word rapping and Curley adds a single-note, quick-delay riff that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

“Grian wrote the music on the original demo and he played the guitar part on the Mellotron,” says Curley.

“The way that it sounded to me was as if he was sampling one of those old cowboy riffs. When it came down to me recording it, I felt like that guitar tone is like something I’ve gone for in the past, but it was more of a ‘live’ sound. For this song, I tried to make it sound more chopped up, lo-fi and darker.”

The guitars were layered, he says, “with an acoustic and a really overdriven electric”. Here’s some of the mouth-watering vintage gear the French studio had to offer: “I played through a Fender Princeton that they had at La Frette, which looked like it would fall over if someone breathed on it, but it sounded absolutely incredible.

“The engineer said that’s the go-to for everyone who records there. It’s an amazing amplifier, and I think it was nice to move away from just using Fender Twins. There’s something about those smaller amps where, if you can record them right, they sound absolutely massive.”

Second single Favourite gave a further glimpse of the album’s scope. Its jangly indie sound was earnest and melancholic – a world away from the confrontational swagger of Starburster.

Propelled forward by one of the band’s best riffs yet, a serendipitous moment of jamming led to the song’s creation.

“Carlos and Grian had written the chords and the beginning of the vocal melody, and they had shown the chord progressions to Deego [bassist Conor Deegan],” says Curley.

“We were doing a live rehearsal for Skinty Fia, and Deego started playing the chords. Sometimes you just hear a melody… As Deego was playing the root notes, I heard this descending riff and had to grab it immediately. I picked up the guitar and started playing it.

“Carlos and Grian realised that was the song they had been working on, so everyone jumped on stage, and we played it for about 30 minutes with, like, 12 different verses. It was just one of those songs that was written in a very short period of time. Sometimes it’s labour, and sometimes it just comes out of thin air. And luckily enough, that was one of those times where I just heard it.”

Favourite has been compared to the likes of The Smiths and ’80s jangle-pop bands, an observation that Curley finds flattering.

“It’s really nice that people are comparing it to Johnny Marr and that kind of guitar playing, ’cos that’s something that I’ve always wanted to try and go into,” he admits. “People who have really slick ears for melody – it’s such an incredible thing. Shredding is obviously such an amazing thing to be able to do on a guitar, but when you can really write a feeling with a melody, like Johnny Marr did so well – that’s the goal.”

In the spirit of reinvention, Romance finds Curley taking on lead vocals on the dreamy Sundowner, and trying his hand at the guitar’s four-stringed cousin on the album’s gothic, Danny Elfman-like title track.

Of the latter’s genesis, Curley says: “Grian had the idea of this chord progression, but not much else. Deego wasn’t there [in the studio]. We were like, ‘Oh, let’s just start working on this a little bit’. So I grabbed the bass and started playing that riff. There was a late-night air of lunacy going around. I wanted to write a panto.

“‘Maybe romance is a place’,” he says quoting Chatten’s lyrics. “It had this intro-to-a-musical feel to it. I just started playing that melody on bass, and then we built the rest of the song around that.”

Long-time fans of the band may have been surprised to see Curley stood in Deego’s place as the group opened a number of their summer festival sets with the song.

“When it came to doing it live, I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll just keep playing it on bass’. But to be honest, I didn’t realise how scary it would be to be playing bass on stage. I thought I’d just pick it up, but it’s actually such an unnatural thing for me that it took more practice than I thought it would. But I enjoy playing the bass so much. It was nice to be over in that world for one song.”

Detailing the crunchier sound he had alluded to, Curley tells TG about a new purchase used to achieve the overdriven sound of third single Here’s The Thing: “The fuzz is a Keeley Loomer pedal – just the fuzz side of it, which I think is based on an outbound fuzz. I think that is an incredible pedal. I incorporate it now into some of the older tunes as well, and it sounds incredibly massive.”

To round off the tone, the Loomer was run through a Boss chorus pedal, with the guitar boasting no reverb whatsoever. “That’s the early 2000s rock sound to me,” says Curley. “And when I hear that lead line, it’s like what Keith Richards did on Satisfaction – where when you have fuzz on it, it kind of sounds like a horn section.”

Though the band are branching out from post-punk – a genre where big pedalboards are commonplace – Curley has no intention of cutting back.

“I just continue to build it up!” he says. “But I realised that I have all these effects pedals that are only used for very specific things, and not even for whole songs. I own a lot of effects, but the main part of my tone, over my career, is just a really good amp sound with reverb, and anything else is just for a bridge or a pre-chorus.

“We’re not actually that big on effects in terms of whole-song arrangements, it’s just to add flavour to a basic guitar sound. But for this album, I was trying to push the boat out in terms of the amount of overdrive that I’d use and the gnarliness of the sounds.”

Despite a focus on distorted tones, Romance features a surprising number of acoustic guitars, too. “I think that kind of acoustic-rhythm-with-drums thing has always been a part of our songs, especially on Skinty Fia, with 12-string acoustics being so prominent,” says Curley, who believes that “there should be some sort of call-and-response between drums and acoustic guitar.”

Whilst Carlos used his Martin J 12-15 parlour 12-string on Romance, Curley borrowed a beautiful Gibson ES-150 from Ford: “It’s a hollowbody with one P-90 in the neck, and I played it through the Princeton to give it a bit of fuzz.”

Though often spotted playing a Johnny Marr signature Jaguar or a rare Coronado, Fender-loving Curley’s MVP for the Romance era thus far has been an American Vintage II 1966 Jazzmaster in Lake Placid Blue – an acquisition that came from more of a practical need than an aesthetic one.

“I realised that the Johnny Marr Jag is so crystal-clear,” Curley says pensively. “That’s the Johnny Jag on Favourite. I feel like that’s the kind of sound that it’s best for. But for the bigger-sounding songs, like Desire and Here’s The Thing, it needed that Kevin Shields, shoegaze rhythm sound.

“Even on Sundowner, which has a mental open tuning, the Johnny Jag didn’t take up enough audio space. So it’s mainly the Jazzmaster on most songs for this album. I asked Fender for one, and they sent it out to me when we were touring Skinty Fia, which I ended up using on Nabokov and Big Shot for the rhythm sound. When it came to doing this record, it seemed using that guitar was a natural progression.”

Has Fontaines’ ascension to festival main-stage had any impact on their songwriting?

“When I’m writing, I’m writing for the feeling of what I’m trying to put across,” he says, “and I don’t think how many people are going to be watching can really affect that. It’s not really a positive thing to think about in terms of your decisions when you’re writing music.”

Though the venus have gotten larger, Curley’s idea of Fontaines remains the same – at least, for now. “I always think of us as a 1,200-capacity-room kind of band,” he says, “and then everything that’s bigger is just us dipping into something new. But I’ll probably have to come to terms with being a bigger band at some stage…”

In June 2023, Chatten released Chaos For The Fly, his debut album as a solo artist, and one that came with another revelation for casual fans: that Chatten is something of an accomplished guitarist himself.

When asked whether Chatten’s six-string capabilities added to the writing of Romance, Curley beams with enthusiasm for his bandmate’s ability: “Oh, 100 per cent, yeah. The solo on Death Kink was Grian. And I think that’s one of the big guitar parts that he brought forward. The solo needed to be done and no one had written it, so he took it and absolutely nailed it. He’s an amazing guitar player.”

After layering so many guitar and keys tracks on Romance, ex-Palma Violets bassist and friend of the band Chili Jesson was enlisted to fill out their sound live – prompting a new foray into three-guitar territory.

“Sometimes with the Mellotron or the keyboard or the piano stuff, Carlos wasn’t playing guitar, so it just got to the point where we were really stretching ourselves trying to do what we did in the studio live,” explains Curley. “Then again, there’s also acoustic guitar on songs like Televised Mind, which we hadn’t been able to do live for years, so I think it really adds something that we’ve been missing out on.”

For a group that’s released four albums in five years, Fontaines D.C. are showing no signs of slowing down, though Curley can only speculate as to where their new direction will lead them.

“There have been some jams,” he says, “but it remains to be seen. I could see us stripping things back again and kind of becoming an ‘in the room’ live band once more, just to prove that we’re still the best at that to each other.

“After doing an album that’s massively layered and building these walls of sound, to go back to just writing really good parts, and maybe having just two guitars might be the way forward.

“But it’s too early to make a guess on that yet. We’ll see what happens…”

• Romance is out now via XL Recordings.