Fontaines D.C. played an electrifying sold-out show to rapturous fans at Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre on October 11. The Irish post-punk band exhibited a flair for dramatics as they opened with the slow-building title track off their latest album Romance, which was released this past August. Guitarist Conor Curley and drummer Tom Coll took the stage first, and Curley set the tone with the track’s haunting first notes. Bassist Conor Deegan III and guitarist Carlos O’Connell walked on next, and as the track was filling out, the crowd’s cheers were only growing louder.
Frontman Grian Chatten could be heard before he could be seen. As he ambled onto the stage in a long black trench coat, the crowd erupted. “Maybe romance is a place,” Chatten sang over the band’s cinematic arrangement, inviting audience members to immerse themselves in the band’s world for the following 85 spectacular minutes.
The crowd took a minute to loosen up, but the mosh pit was quickly taking shape as Chatten began to sing the first lines of “A Lucid Dream,” and by “Roman Holiday,” the first crowd surfers were barreling over heads toward the stage.
The setlist drew on all four of Fontaines D.C.’s albums, and the crowd responded with high energy to every era of the band’s ever-evolving sound. Fans passionately sang along to “Big” and “Sha Sha Sha” off the band’s 2019 debut Dogrel, and spirits were exceptionally high for the tracks off Romance—the excitement of the new release clearly still holding fans in a well-justified tight grip.
A highlight of the night was the band’s intoxicating performance of “Nabokov,” off 2022’s Skinty Fia—a song that feels necessary to be heard live in an echoey room at least once. The powerful mix of Chatten’s lead vocals with Deegan’s backing vocals, accompanied by the shoegaze-y guitars, created a blanket of sound whose warmth could be felt long after the song had ended.
Chatten was a man of few words in between songs, but he still demonstrated that he knows to use his voice when it matters. “Free Palestine,” the frontman exclaimed, before O’Connell began strumming the opening chords to the band’s classic hit “Boys in the Better Land.” The only extraneous decor on stage was a Palestinian flag which hung proudly over O’Connell’s synth stand for the entirety of the night.
Once the band exited the stage after performing the incredibly uplifting “Favourite,” incessant cheering and chanting filled the theatre until they returned for the three-song encore: “In the Modern World,” “I Love You,” and the flashy “Starburster.”
At the end of the night, fans flooded out of the theatre into Exhibition Place proudly donning their band merch (and at least one Guinness t-shirt), surely feeling affirmed that there can’t be many better ways to spend a Friday night than at a Fontanes D.C. show. The band’s live performance is exactly what you would expect, in the best way possible.
Been Stellar is opening for Fontaines D.C. on the USA and Canada leg of the Romance tour. Fontaines D.C. will be continuing the tour across Europe and the UK in November and December.