New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Following the release of his debut solo song "The Score," just last week, Grian Chatten has unveiled details of his debut solo album,
Chaos For The Fly, to be released June 30th via Partisan Records. The Fontaines D.C. vocalist worked with producer Dan Carey on the record.
To coincide with its announcement, a new track, "Fairlies" is streaming now with a video animated by Callum Scott-Dyson.
Of the track, Grian says, "I wrote "Fairlies" in intense heat. Partly in Jerez, Spain, partly in LA a couple of days before a Fontaines D.C. tour kicked off. It was a quick write, and I believe I celebrated each line with a beer."
Thirty miles north of Dublin along a windswept promenade you'll find a tired casino, the sort of place anyone familiar with the rusted seaside glamor of forgotten coastal towns will recognize. A now shuttered escape where the crack of pool balls and chink of glasses in the lounge bar reverberated within the ever-present whirr and jangle of slot machines. Unremarkable to some, perhaps, but it was where
Chaos For The Fly was born.
"I was walking along Stoney Beach at night and it came to me on the waves," recalls Chatten. "I just stood there and looked at them and I heard the whole fing thing. Every part of it, from the chord progressions to the string arrangements."
The resulting songs could have been taken, shaped and reimagined with his bandmates in Fontaines D.C., but Chatten decided to treat these differently.
"I just thought: I want to do this myself. I know where we as a band are going next and that's not where I want to go with this. I've got a couple of exaggerated aspects of my soul that I wanted to express," he says.
"The rest of the band are all creative and songwriters in their own right, too. I didn't want to go to them and be like, 'No, every single thing has to be like this.' I didn't want to compromise with these songs in that way."
Co-produced by Fontaines' longstanding producer Dan Carey, the album is the most poetic we've heard yet from Chatten. Songs such as the fingerpicking kiss-off of opener "The Score" or "Fairlies"' wounded isolation present a heavily distilled vision that is heady in its strength and at times comes with a dark undertow.
"A lot of the album was written with just me and a guitar and I really like the idea of it being boiled down to those elements. That feeling of having the song in the palm of your hand, that control of having it with just you and a guitar," he says. "There's an intensity as a result of that."
Over its nine tracks,
Chaos For The Fly takes in all of life's emotions and stories. Yes, some are painful, but in giving shape and form to them and making those voices come alive, Chatten has created something with its own unique beauty. A place you not only want to visit, but will find yourself returning to again and again.
It's been a hectic but rewarding 12 months for Fontaines D.C., debuting at #1 in both the UK and Ireland with their third album, the critically acclaimed, Ivor Novello-nominated Skinty Fia, and taking home the BRIT Award for International Group of the Year.
It followed 2020's A Hero's Death, which was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards and their debut, 2019's Dogrel, which was nominated for both the Mercury
Music Prize and Ireland's Choice
Music Prize. The band returns to North
America in August for an arena tour with Arctic Monkeys.
