Fontaines D.C. – “Televised Mind”
Fontaines D.C. are about a month out from releasing their sophomore album, A Hero’s Death. The Dublin band have shared two singles from it so far — the title track and “I Don’t Belong” (plus covered The Jesus And Mary Chain in between that) — and today they’re back with the album’s third single, “Televised Mind.” It’s a gloomy and nervy soup of circling guitars that sounds like zoning out to some background noise TV to escape from the outside world.
Here’s frontman Grian Chatten on the song:
This song is about the echo chamber, and how personality gets stripped away by surrounding approval. People’s opinions get reinforced by constant agreement, and we’re robbed of our ability to feel wrong. We’re never really given the education of our own fallibility. People feign these great beliefs in order to appear trendy, as opposed to independently arriving at their own thoughts.
We were listening to a lot of The Prodigy and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, specifically their song “Open Heart Surgery”. I was interested in extrapolating those types of chord progressions and capturing this droning, hypnotic feel. That last line repeated over and over [“What ya call it”] is a buffer expression that people used here in Dublin. It’s sort of like “umm” or “well…” – it’s what people say when they’re distracted.
Watch the Hugh Mulhern-directed video for the track below.
A Hero’s Death is out 7/31 on Partisan Records.