Even though this special recording of Fontaines D.C.’s “A Lucid Dream” was made during lockdown, with each member isolated from the rest of his bandmates, it’s underpinned by a strong communal spirit. “I had to beg, borrow and steal some recording equipment, so I’m really grateful to my friends and neighbours who helped me out loads with a desk and some mics,” says drummer Tom Coll. “I also commandeered my brother’s studio monitors, which was sound of him.” Luckily, Coll had the presence of mind to take his most important bit of equipment with him when he left Dublin to spend lockdown with his mum and brother. “I thankfully threw my drum kit in the car just as I was leaving,” he says. “It would have been hard to do anything without it. Recording everyone’s part separately was a strange experience—I realised a lot of my live performance is based on feeding off the other lads in the band, so recording by myself was a bit of a challenge but I think we all did what we could have, given the circumstances.” It’s even a little surprising that Coll found his neighbours and family in such generous mood, given that he spent every day of lockdown banging away at his kit. “Practising was such a fulfilling thing to do,” he says. “For the last couple of years we’ve been so focused on the band that we’ve kind of neglected our own playing time, and it was really cool for me to start trying to play a bit of jazz drums, and stuff that was completely different to what I’d usually play. I really hope to try and keep that routine up as it brought me so much joy.” He wasn’t the only one exploring new directions. All of the band kept writing songs by themselves—and the results they shared when they were finally able to reconvene in Dublin suggest that the next Fontaines record might be an even more expansive experience than their second album, A Hero’s Death. “We had all these demos that we were jamming that weren’t necessarily Fontaines tunes but all really different buzzes that everyone was working away on,” Coll says. “All the lads were writing these amazing songs but everyone had their own style going on—which will be interesting once we all get back in a jam room again.”