At long last, Fontaines D.C. returned to Vancouver on Friday night after being forced to cancel their September date because singer Grian Chatten couldn’t speak without pain despite rest and medication. But the protracted wait was worthwhile to hear a healed and healthy Chatten, along with his bandmates Conor Curley, Conor Deegan, Tom Coll, and Carlos O’Connell, bring the Dublin rock quintet’s stadium-sized nü-metal-inspired songs from their fourth album, 2024’s critically acclaimed Romance, to the Commodore Ballroom. If one thing was clear last night, though, it was that with increasingly grand, sophisticated, aspirational, and genre-fluid songwriting, Fontaines D.C. have outgrown 1000-capacity venues. Not only did the show, like its original date, sell out in seconds, but also, everyone at the Commodore seemed to move as one as the band and their raucous fans exploded with energy.

England’s Jadu Heart made for a solid choice of opener. Although the shoegazing quartet flirted heavily with electronic beats, drum loops, and dream pop textures, overall, they evoked as many similar moods as Fontaines D.C. – not enough to be redundant or, as sometimes happens,
overshadow the headliners, though.

The early crowd packed the front of the stage more quickly and densely than I’d seen in years. It can be difficult for an opener to penetrate such eager anticipation, but Jadu Heart hooked the audience from the jump with “Metal Violets.” The audience was already open and attentive, but they came alive with cheers and claps as soon as the main keyboardist picked up a violin, an instrument that featured throughout the rest of Jadu Heart’s set as the band wove through “Dead, Again,” “U,” and “Mild to Moderate Pain.”

Instead of barrelling onstage with any one of Fontaines D.C.’s numerous high-octane, rubber-burning bangers, the band let anticipation build with the sweeping, ominous “Romance.” From the next song, “Jackie Down the Line,” on, fans were dialed in, hooked on every lyric. They kept up with Chatten as Fontaines D.C. cruised through the hypnotic “Televised Mind.” They put the Commodore’s distinctly bouncy floor to the test during “Big.” It wasn’t until Fontaines D.C. jammed the pedal to the floor with their biggest smash, “Boys in the Better Land,” more than halfway through their set that security mobilized to pluck out crowd surfers. By the time the band moved onto “Favourite,” the night had reached such a fevered pitch that a grown man swiped at Chatten’s legs as security led the offending crowd surfer back into the throng; most absurd of all, “Favourite” is without question the band’s purest, most unabashedly joyous, saccharine, and uplifting song.

As Fontaines D.C. showed throughout most of their set, they specialize in the opposite: dark, brooding, and downright melancholic slowburning eruptions. But the Irishmen didn’t lose the audience for a second with “Big Shot,” the heavy-handed “Death Kink,” or the particularly menacing “Nabokov.” Chatten was characteristically short on words all night except a couple of muttered expressions of gratitude. “Free Palestine. Thank you,” he said to a burst of cheers following “I Love You,” giving timely poignancy to this love letter to Ireland of his on which he simultaneously shines a light on his homeland’s dark history including “selling genocide and half-cut pride.”

After 12 songs (a relatively small number for a band with four albums to date), Fontaines D.C. departed the stage. With the lights still down, the audience still salivating for more and breaking into a few waves of “olé” chants, the band returned with the cinematic “In the Modern World,” the steamy, hissing “Desire,” and the above-mentioned “I Love you” before going out one of the many ways they could have started, with the galactic bang of “Starburster.” No doubt, next time Vancouver fans see Fontaines D.C., it will be on a bigger, brighter stage, and I can wait.

Order tickets for Fontaines D.C. HERE

Fontaines D.C. at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, BC April 18th photo by Leslie Ken Chu