The worst thing anyone could say to Mr Grian Chatten is that he’s not really Irish. As frontman and chief lyricist of the Dublin post-punk quintet Fontaines D.C., Chatten has channelled life growing up in Ireland into his band’s music, songs that take in themes of mental health, corrupt governments, religion and community. In many ways, his country defines him, as a songwriter, as an artist and as a person. But the singer was born in Barrow-In-Furness in the north of England. He moved to Ireland at the grand old age of one month and if someone said that meant he wasn’t truly of the Emerald Isle, Chatten would be broken. “It would hurt me a lot because I draw so much from it,” he says over Zoom from his flat in Kentish Town, north London. “It would invalidate me.”

When Chatten was working on Fontaines D.C.’s excellent third album, Skinty Fia, out in April, he sat down to write a romantic song called “I Love You”, but something else came out. “Lo and behold, it turned out to be another song about Ireland,” he says. “I think I’ve got great guilt about leaving Ireland in the state that it’s in. I’m very sad about what’s going on over there. The government is driving the country into the ground, keeping a lid on previous scandals. That song is me saying I love Ireland and I always will.” Amid all the seething political ire and raw emoting on the record, however, the overriding feeling is one of hope.

Skinty Fia caps off a whirlwind few years for Chatten and his band. They formed at college in Dublin in 2017 and released their raucous debut album, Dogrel two years later. They received a Grammy Award nomination for the 2020 follow-up, A Hero’s Death. Mixing post-punk grooves and minimalist rock dynamics, they make music that tackles the big issues through the prism of personal experience. Their songs are shot through with youthful exhilaration and the bite-marks of early adulthood, the big nights out and the fretful hangovers that follow. Chatten’s vocal delivery, always in his natural Dublin accent, pinballs between fiery sing-speak and impassioned crooning and makes you feel less like you’re watching from the front row and more that you’re trapped in a confession box with him. The new record broadens the group’s sonic palette. It’s expansive and loose where their first two records were tightly wound. Sometimes, it sounds like early The Cure, if Mr Robert Smith’s crew rehearsed only on the way home from an all-day bender. Fontaines D.C. are one of the most thrilling guitar bands to emerge this century.

Chatten thinks one of the reasons their songs have chimed so acutely is because there is nothing disingenuous about the way he writes. His lyrics feel distinctly personal, but not conceited. “I think if you write about yourself you sound like a narcissist,” he says, “but if you write about yourself without meaning to, then you’re really writing about other people.”

Many of the tracks on Skinty Fia were informed by the band’s relocation to London and questions about home and belonging hang over the whole album. “There’s a lot of covert prejudice and stereotypes still kept alive by people here,” he says, “either little micro-aggressions or blatant racism towards Irish people. I used to laugh about it because I didn’t feel it was important with all the movements in the world going on, but these things build up.” He recounts how recently, Fontaines D.C.’s drummer was in a London pub and overheard someone say, “There’s a lot of fucking Irish people out there today. We better check if there are any bombs.” Chatten reckons it subconsciously seeped into his writing. “It made the album a little bit more Irish because we coveted that which made us different.”

Despite that, Chatten likes living in London. He loves the sprawling nature of the city and a part of him enjoys the sense of being an outsider. “It drives me closer to who I am,” he says. “Especially when you’re in a group of young Irish people living in London, it can be a great social adhesive between youse. You’re huddled together a bit more.”

Like everyone, Covid has forced Chatten to spend an inordinate amount of time at home over the past 21 months. Fontaines D.C. were on the crest of a wave as the pandemic ground the world to a halt in March 2020, their Mercury-nominated debut already a hit and A Hero’s Death ready for release. But rather than feel deprived of a victory lap, haunted by the ghosts of tours that never were, Chatten was offered a vital period of respite by Covid. It saved him from himself.

He explains how during the group’s first big tour, which included exhausting drives across the US, he developed crippling insomnia. “I was basically too bollocksed all the time and the idea of a bed started to scare me more and more,” he says. “You’re checking in to a hotel at 4.00am in between two cities and you have to wake up at seven or eight to do the rest of the drive. The pressure to get a good sleep in those three or four hours became too much for me.” At one point, he went a full week without hitting the hay. “I used to just sit in the lobby of the hotel, watch the sun come up with a beer from a vending machine and wait for everyone else to get out of bed.”

Lockdown forced him to face his problem. He looks back with horror on those first few months at home, describing them as some of the darkest times of his life. “I was in my flat, upset at 6.00am, raging against the rest of the world and feeling like a freak because I couldn’t sleep.” A sleep therapist advised him to decide on a time to wake up every day and stick to it, regardless of when he went to bed. It worked.

When Fontaines D.C. first formed, Chatten had a rather humble notion of future success – he and his bandmates would emerge with their love of music and creativity intact. “I wanted to make some good music and when it’s done, still have that enjoyment of playing guitar and listening to music every day, make sure I had that and not be embittered,” he says. Three albums later, the parameters have changed. “Now, we’re sort of like, if we just keep going and we don’t fuck it up, maybe I could raise my kid on this.” He says this rise in expectations doesn’t interfere with his writing. “I like to believe that my world creatively is iron-clad and insular,” says the man who puts all of himself into his songs, even when he doesn’t mean to. It’s what makes this songwriting dynamo tick. Nothing can tamper with that.