Fontaines D.C. - Skinty Fia

Skinty Fia is the third studio album by Irish-post punk band Fontaines D.C., released in April 2022 via Partisan Records.

Fontaines D.C., recently crowned ‘Best Band In The World’ at the NME Awards, return with new album, Skinty Fia.

Skinty Fia is an Irish phrase which translates to English as “the damnation of the deer” and the album’s cover art features a deer, plucked from its natural habitat and deposited in the hallway of a home, illuminated by an artificial red glow.

The Irish giant deer is an extinct species and the band’s thoughts on Irish identity are central to Skinty Fia.

While Dogrel was littered with snapshots of the Dublin characters - like the cabbie in ‘Boys In The Better Land’ - and A Hero’s Death documented the dislocation and disconnection the band felt as they travelled the globe on tour, on Skinty Fia Fontaines D.C. are addressing their Irishness from afar as they recreate new lives for themselves elsewhere.

For a band whose hometown courses through their veins - “D.C.” stands for “Dublin City” - the album finds them trying to resolve the need to broaden their horizons with the affection they still feel for the land and people they’ve left behind.

There are echoes of Dogrel’s rumbustious rock ’n’ roll, and the bleaker atmospheres of A Hero’s Death, but Skinty Fia, the third in the triumvirate, is much more expansive and cinematic.

Fontaines D.C. are a band in a state of constant evolution and this time the result is an album of shifting moods, startling insight, maturity, and considerable emotional wallop.

This album is on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in Europe via Partisan Records.