Fontaines D.C.’s 2019 debut album, Dogrel, was an aural love letter to the band’s adopted hometown of Dublin: a record so fixated with locale it should have come with a map. Released a year later, follow-up A Hero’s Death wasn’t defined by a sense of place as it was the total lack of one. Worn out by extensive touring, the band crafted an unsettling but powerful second act. Detailed character studies about bar room poets and drizzle-sodden romantics were swapped out for far more impressionistic lyrical imagery and the punk-scuffed rattle of before rebuilt as a surging walls of sound that ebbed and flowed according to the sea change of mood, be it on the pummelling Happy Mondays-go-Can trance of ‘Televised Mind’ or the beautiful a capella section that flowers within ‘Sunny’’s seasick lurch. A remarkable step forward for a band who currently seem to get better and better with each release.