Photo: Theo Cottle

Fontaines D.C. have earned a reputation as a band that won’t sit still, and yet ‘Romance’ still registers as a significant transformation. Since releasing 2022’s ‘Skinty Fia’, itself a reinvention of their earlier post-punk sound, there has been a shift from baggy T-shirts and trackie bottoms to sitting front-row at Milan Fashion Week, a change of record labels from Partisan to XL, and a switching out of producers, with James Ford tagging in after recent work with The Last Dinner Party, Depeche Mode and Blur. None of this would matter, of course, if the music fell flat. It doesn’t.