The Philadelphia Inquirer: Dan DeLuca's Best Albums of 2024

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”

At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.

Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.” It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album *Short n’ Sweet*. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.” With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.” Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”

Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”

“This album is actually an album of questioning. There\'s a lot of introspection, and within that, I\'m answering questions that I\'ve never had the space or capacity to ask,” Brittany Howard tells Apple Music about *What Now*, the Alabama Shakes singer-guitarist’s second solo album. “I was always so busy, I was always running around, I was on tour, I was preparing this, preparing that. This time I told myself when I would go in there and make songs in my little demo room, ‘No one\'s ever going to hear this,’ and it was very freeing.” Of course, people would end up hearing those songs, but that mindset helped Howard write from a brave new perspective. She dives into her personal history and guiding philosophy in a vulnerable way, like she did on 2019’s *Jaime*, but this time, the instrumental choices are bolder and more unexpected than ever before. “Power to Undo” is a folk-rock tune that showcases the album’s central theme. “You have the power to undo everything that I want/But I won\'t let you,” she sings. Once that’s revealed, the song descends into an acid-funk freakout, built around scratchy guitars and ramshackle drums. “‘Power to Undo’ is actually about freedoms,” she says. “A lot of people can experience this feeling of ‘I know I shouldn\'t do that. I know I need to keep moving in this direction.’ It\'s just about this thing chasing you down, and you\'re like, ‘No, you\'re not going to get me, I\'m not going to change directions.’” Elsewhere, on “Prove It to You,” Howard cues up gauzy synths and a dance-floor drum groove that’s made for an after-hours. It’s the furthest from the rootsy rock Howard rose to fame with, but the creative risks of *What Now* suggest an artist more interested in following a muse than replicating past successes. “I am always expanding and evolving and trying new things,” Howard says. “That\'s the most fun about being a creative person—trying things that challenge you and you don\'t know anything about.”

On Doechii’s 2024 release, the Tampa-born rapper showcases the blend of clever rhymes with deep, philosophical musings that have punctuated early releases like 2020’s *Oh the Places You\'ll Go* mixtape and 2022’s *she / her / black bitch* EP. Lead cut “STANKA POOH” finds the Top Dawg Entertainment artist wrestling with her artistic mortality and role as a Black woman in music. She raps: “Let’s start the story backwards/I’m dead, she’s dead, just another Black Lives Mattered/And if I die today I die a bastard/TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor.” Obviously, Doechii aims to be bigger than viral clips and TV shows so small they can fit on your computer screen. On *Alligator Bites Never Heal*, Doechii asserts herself as one of rap’s most impressive bar-for-bar MCs. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” is a classic narrative cut in the style of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” while “NISSAN ALTIMA” is an electro-rap thriller designed to keep the dance floor hot and heart rates up. She sums it up simply enough when she raps: “All beef gets smoked/I’m a real fly bitch, you in coach.”

The musician born Josh Tillman chose the title for his sixth album in a decidedly Father John Misty kind of way: He found the Sanskrit word in a novel by Bruce Wagner, who shares with the musician a certain impish LA mysticism. Mahāśmaśāna translates to “great cremation ground,” so it’s no surprise to find the singer-songwriter in “what’s it all mean?” mode, trawling tragicomic corners of the American Southwest in search of answers about life, death, and humanity. After trying his hand at big-band jazz on 2022’s *Chloë and the Next 20th Century*, Tillman returns to the big, sweeping ’70s-style pop rock that’s earned him a place among his generation’s most intriguing songwriters. He channels Leonard Cohen’s *Death of a Ladies’ Man* on the sprawling title track, whose swooning orchestration and ambitious lyrics take stock of, well, everything. “She Cleans Up” tells a rollicking tale involving female aliens, high-dollar kimonos, and rabbits with guns, and on dystopian power ballad “Screamland,” he offers an all-American refrain: “Stay young/Get numb/Keep dreaming.”

If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.

Morgan Wade’s life changed drastically in just a few years. The famously tattooed, rebellious country singer-songwriter broke out with 2021’s *Reckless*, attracting a rabid fanbase in the process. Wade seems to take stock of that dizzying experience on *Obsessed*, which follows 2023’s *Psychopath* and finds her digging deeper into solo songwriting—there are no co-writers on the album. Produced by her touring guitarist Clint Wells (a departure from her previous two outings, which Sadler Vaden of Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit produced), the record is Wade’s most vulnerable, with a quieter sound to match its introspective mood. Highlights include the title track, which explores the nuances of an all-consuming love, and “2AM in London,” a frank, folky homesickness song steeped in late nights and loneliness. Pop firebrand Kesha joins Wade on “Walked on Water,” a slow-building ballad about regret and accountability that makes great use of the two singers’ surprisingly complementary voices.

Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”