Grian explains: “’All Of The People’ is the stiff collar tight-fisted hand to the grindstone written where all is blue and everyone is a liar. It is a line of chalk scratched around the world.”

The track arrives alongside a video directed by Sam Taylor, who previously directed the videos for Fontaines D.C.’s “I Love You” and “Roman Holiday”. Speaking of the video, Taylor explains, “Taking inspiration from George Orwell, Billy Wilder, our film analyses loneliness, self-doubt then acceptance, appreciation and human connection. We hope it makes you cry happy/sad tears x”

Thirty miles north of Dublin along a windswept promenade you’ll find a tired casino, the sort of place anyone familiar with the rusted seaside glamor of forgotten coastal towns will recognize. A now shuttered escape where the crack of pool balls and chink of glasses in the lounge bar reverberated within the ever-present whirr and jangle of slot machines. Unremarkable to some, perhaps, but it was where Chaos For The Fly was born.

“I was walking along Stoney Beach at night and it came to me on the waves,” recalls Chatten. “I just stood there and looked at them and I heard the whole fucking thing. Every part of it, from the chord progressions to the string arrangements.”

The resulting songs could have been taken, shaped and reimagined with his bandmates in Fontaines D.C., but Chatten decided to treat these differently.

“I just thought: I want to do this myself. I know where we as a band are going next and that’s not where I want to go with this. I’ve got a couple of exaggerated aspects of my soul that I wanted to express,” he says.

“The rest of the band are all creative and songwriters in their own right, too. I didn’t want to go to them and be like, ‘No, every single thing has to be like this.’ I didn’t want to compromise with these songs in that way.”

The album is the most poetic we’ve heard yet from Chatten. Songs such as the fingerpicking kiss-off of opener “The Score” or “Fairlies”’ wounded isolation present a heavily distilled vision that is heady in its strength and at times comes with a dark undertow.

“A lot of the album was written with just me and a guitar and I really like the idea of it being boiled down to those elements. That feeling of having the song in the palm of your hand, that control of having it with just you and a guitar,” he says. “There’s an intensity as a result of that.”

Grian Chatten 2023 Tour Dates

June 30th – Rough Trade, Bristol SOLD OUT
July 2nd – Night & Day, Manchester (re: Piccadilly Records) SOLD OUT
July 4th – Resident Records, Brighton SOLD OUT
July 5th – Rough Trade East, London SOLD OUT

Pre-order Chaos For The Fly by Grian Chatten HERE