The Grammys are pretty useless, as we know, but the one good thing about it is learning about new bands or songs that may have slipped under the radar. In 2025, the Best Rock album category featured the expected nominations for Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones, Green Day, Jack White and the Black Crowes, all established acts for decades.
Also nominated was Fontaines D.C. for their fourth album Romance, and in a just world, it would have been a contender for the title. The Irish band builds on its cooled post-punk past with dashes of rock, hip-hop and pop smarts, sounding confident and engaged throughout the brisk 37-minute runtime.
The best song on the album, and one of the best songs of 2024, is “Here’s The Thing.” A guitar squall and a busy drum fill introduce the track, with Grian Chatten’s voice alternating between falsetto in the chorus and detached observer in the verses (which drop the guitars completely and let the bass and drums do the talking). It’s a propulsive headrush of a track that gets in and out in less than three minutes and will be a mainstay on your playlist.
Equally of note is “Starburster,” which infuses hip-hop rhythms and speak-singing with spaghetti Western guitar and a general unpredictability, even after you’ve heard it a few times. These two songs together suggest a band that refuses to be pigeonholed and continues to evolve.
This sort of brilliance is hard to maintain on an entire album, but even the slower songs like “Desire” and especially “In The Modern World” maintain an effortless grandeur. The dreary opening title track seems almost like a goodbye to the band’s past; you think you’re in for a moody tone poem about bad love, but as soon as it ends “Starburster” kicks things into gear.
Things do hit a snag toward the end with the rather dull (by comparison) “Motorcycle Boy,” “Sundowner” and “Horseness Is The Whatness,” which calls to mind Oasis when they slowed things down to sound serious on Be Here Now. But the album’s pacing is otherwise flawless, moving between the faster and slower tracks, leading into the bracing penultimate two-minute “Death Kink,” with Chatten shouting off-key and the band barely keeping it together. Things close with the jangle-power-pop of “Favourite,” a hopeful and expansive-sounding track that made it on several year-end best-of lists. Its sweet nature is the opposite of “Starburster,” but it gets under your skin the same way.
With a lesser band, this sort of stylistic variance could sound desperate, but the self-assurance and economical nature of the music feels at once vibrant and necessary. They’ve moved on beyond their post-punk start and their Irish roots, hinting at bigger themes with a broad color palette of sound.
To nobody’s surprise, the Stones won the Best Rock Grammy in 2025, because the Grammy rock voters either didn’t actually listen to the albums or were all born in 1954. But if they had, they would certainly have rated Romance higher.