Fontaines D.C. Bring Unreleased Songs to Their Reading Headline Set

A band gets one shot at the moment a festival stops treating them as an undercard and hands them the top of the bill. Fontaines D.C. reach that moment at Reading, and the interesting question is not whether they belong up there. It is what they have decided to do with the slot.

The safe move, the coronation move, would be to turn the night into a greatest-hits victory lap: the mosh-pit anthems from Romance, the churn of Starburster, an hour engineered to detonate a field. Instead the Dublin five-piece have spent their run-up to this weekend threading new songs into the set, one of them still unreleased, music the crowd in front of them will be meeting for the first time. That is not a coronation. That is a bet.

The bet is on menace over reassurance. The band’s power has always been a claustrophobic thing, built on Grian Chatten’s coiled delivery and the low, advancing throb underneath him, a sound that works like a room closing in. It is why they can flatten a mid-size hall. It is also the quality that scale tests most brutally. When they headlined Finsbury Park in front of tens of thousands, even admirers noticed the set played less like an event than a victory lap; the drama that makes them frightening up close can thin out across an open field. Reading’s main stage is exactly that kind of open field, at exactly that scale.

What they have actually been playing this summer tells you how they are squaring it. Their European festival sets lean hard on Romance, the churn of Favourite and In the Modern World and Here’s the Thing, while still reaching back to the early gut-punches, Boys in the Better Land and Hurricane Laughter, that first built the pits. Starburster, the song that finally broke them into the singles chart, closes the night. It is a set built to keep a festival moving. Dropping something unheard into it, at a headline slot, is the part that is not safe.

The new material belongs to a fifth album the band frame less as a record than as a device pointed at the listener. Chatten has described it as a chamber you step inside, one that tests, in his words, different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you. That is an art-installation pitch, not a festival pitch. Selling it to a crowd that came to shout along to Big is a different job entirely, and the band appear to want the harder job.

Which is what makes the slot worth watching for reasons the must-watch billing keeps missing. The easy read is that this is the night Fontaines graduate into the arena-headliner tier, Glastonbury next, the trajectory everyone has already drawn for them. The harder, truer read is that they are using their biggest platform yet to protect the thing that got them here, the refusal to be merely likeable. A set that is all anthems would confirm the promotion. A set that makes a field sit with something unfamiliar, and holds it there, would prove something larger.

The performance airs live from Reading on Friday night, carried on BBC One and iPlayer, part of a weekend that also hands headline slots to Charli xcx, Florence and the Machine, Dave, RAYE and Chase and Status. From here the band go straight to Electric Picnic in Ireland and then to the United States, the new album, Dopamine Chamber, due in October on XL.

The tell tonight will not be the size of the roar for Starburster. It will be the quiet, whether a crowd that came for the hits stays inside a song it has never heard, and lets the room close in.

Tags: music-en1, Dopamine Chamber, Fontaines D.C., Grian Chatten, post-punk, Reading Festival