How Fontaines DC won 2024 with their triumphant homecoming gigs

After a triumphant 2024, Fontaines DC returned to Dublin last week to play their homecoming gigs, across two massive shows, to an audience of around 28,000 fans. Enjoy a gallery of pics by photographer Leah Carroll above, while Jim Carroll pays his respects below.

The Nostradamus lad can go home.

Midway through the show down at that Point where the city once began, Fontaines D.C. play Big. If there was ever a chorus fitted to an occasion, it’s "my childhood was small, but I’m gonna be big". Biggest shed in town, massive sellout crowd in the gaff two nights in a row: it doesn’t get more righteous than that. Dublin in the rip of a winter’s night is theirs.

Molly Keane's 2019 video for Big

They’ve earned it. Fontaines DC are a band who’ve worked and worked and worked some more. You don’t get to release a hatful of albums in a handful of years (four by the band, one by lead singer Grian Chatten) if you’re sitting around dossing and giving out and slagging your peers.

They got on with it. They bested a pandemic which levelled their sector by releasing records which got better and better at every turn. They toured like they owed a trucking company and were paying off the bank loans. They slayed at every juncture. Bigger rooms, bigger crowds, They turned Big into a better prediction than any political party’s election manifesto.

Dublin, night one. Thank you. Love you. pic.twitter.com/6oybq3TNal

— Fontaines D.C. (@fontainesdublin) December 7, 2024

This year, they've produced their highest watermark to date. Their 2024 album Romance is a place where they’ve truly taken off. Every song hits like the wind off the Liffey. They’ve jettisoned their influences to become the ones who’ll now set the pace. A band of few words onstage perhaps, that record speaks volumes for where they’re at and where they’re going.

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A shout out finally for one lad in particular. Fair play to their manager Trevor Dietz who has plotted and prodded and nudged this ship on its course. I still remember his wide-eyed enthusiasm for the band when he dragged me off the street to see them in the Workman's Club in 2017. He could see the forms taking shape back then and he went all in.

There will be many more nights like this to come for him and them.