As they say: poor land that needs heroes. And rock, for twenty years, has been in a bad way: since the genre, in its declinations, has lost phosphorus and a sense of novelty, and guitars have disappeared from the radio and streaming charts, every new band that arouses a minimum of interest outside the usual circle of enthusiasts, that gives the impression of being able to renew everything and put certain sounds back at the center of the debate, well, it comes out in a simplistic way that it will “save rock”, pulling it away from the conservatism in which it has ended up, to bring it back to what it was – a music, that is, of rupture. It happened with Måneskin, about whose success and relative meaning everything has been written. And it’s happening now with the Irish Fontaines DC, fresh from the release of their fourth album, Romanceand considered a hot topic by critics around the world.

The Return of Post-Punk

Let’s be clear, they play two different championships and the comparison is purely perceptionof the idea of ​​the “saviors”. If Damiano and his associates have brought back a more flashy and glittery idea of ​​rock, from Iggy Pop to the Rolling Stones themselves (for inspiration, more or less), these go on the wild side of alternative, drawing from the English post-punk of the eighties, from the Smiths more than from U2, to whom for reasons of origin, as well as ambition (read: to take everything), they continue to be compared. In terms of range alone, they are not comparable to Måneskin, and as the parable of Coldplay testifies – starting out as the new Radiohead and ending up duetting with BTS – to fill stadiums you need more.

But there’s always a rock to be saved, here, and the fact is that Fontaines DC could say so much to many: they have a dark and defined sound, live they have become machines, the frontman, Grian Chatten, has charisma to sell and lyrics focused on a poetic reading and bad of current events and in short they have what it takes to send fans into raptures; in short, they are living flesh, and having established that we are not talking about cosplayers for nostalgics, the challenge becomes, precisely, to speak to the new generations, generally oriented towards completely different sounds.

Romancein this sense, is the key passage of the whole speech. It came out with sky-high expectations after the recognitions collected by the previous Skinti fia (2022), and it represents the great leap, starting from an aesthetic repositioning – they have adopted a freakier look, with dyed hair and eccentric clothes: evidently the eye and social media want their part – up to a more melodic writing, which gives the impression of dialoguing with the radio and the tastes of the general public. This explains, on the one hand, a piece like favouritea ballad all guitars and melancholy that in the past months has served as a trailblazer, as well as indicative episodes that find a hook with the present at all costs, from treatments such as In the modern world (where the ghost of Bono Vox is there, indeed) on dark rides like Starbusterwith almost rap verses. Compared to a debut like Dogrel (2019), whose subtext was the rejection of current times and tastes, the boundaries and attitude are much less clear.

A sign of life?

The album – how strange, even here, to still think for discsin an era where streaming has made releases fluid, rather than monolithic – it’s truly a nice album, but that’s not the point. True, the leap and the evolution were coherent, time and talent are on their side, and that’s fine. The point is that in all the cases that are raised, including theirs, it makes no sense to talk about “saviors of rock”: the break in History has already arrived, and it’s difficult for a single group, moreover exalted by the desert around them, to revive a genre that is first of all a set of values, a vision tied to an era. It’s true for every band: it may be that listening to them many kids will lock themselves in the cellar, pick up their guitars and share a certain idea of ​​the world, but it’s not a given that there will be an audience waiting for them.

The success of Fontaines DC, who have already partly made inroads among the very young (it happened to a greater extent to Arctic Monkeys, but TikTok is involved), if anything for now remains more of an exception than a potential rule. But it is indicative of another trend. And that is: there is someone who still knows how to preach well in the desert, and there is someone – many, maybe not very many, but enough to transform them into a phenomenon worth wondering about – willing to listen to them. In itself, this is excellent news for anyone approaching alternative music. It is up to them, and only them, to manage this responsibility: without thinking about saving anyone.