Fontaines D.C. head up Antidote this week with new single “Starburster”. It’s the first track to be taken from their just-announced fourth album, Romance, due on 23 August, and, frankly, the band have shown very little intention to ease us gently into their new era. “I think ‘Starburster’ is the track on the record that’s probably the most shocking for fans,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music. “It’s a lot more electronic-inspired and hip-hop-inspired. It’s a bit of a departure from the last record, for sure. I feel like we always try and shock people a little bit, every record seems like a much bigger step away from the last one. Grian [Chatten, singer] came up with the main guts of the tune. I feel like everyone in the band bought Mellotrons over the time off, so we’ve been kind of experimenting with string sounds and warping electronics and stuff like that. I remember Grian showed me a demo for the tune outside a pub in Camden and I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s unreal!’” Work essentially began on Romance in late 2023, with ideas being written and developed while the band were on tour with Arctic Monkeys, before the album was recorded in London and Paris over a seven-week period with producer James Ford. “This album is more the sum of the parts [than previous albums],” says Coll. “A lot of people in the band wrote separately and would bring in nearly fully formed tunes. Everyone was bringing in stuff. It’s less of a writing-in-the-room record. The real difference was that we were writing in a fully functioning studio in London. We were spending more time on production and using the studio as more of an instrument, which we never really did—we were always kind of a band in a room and you just record that. I think it’s a little bit darker, it’s a little bit grungier as well. I feel like we were listening to a lot of ’90s, Deftones-y kind of shit. So the record is more in that vein, it’s kind of hip-hop inspired as well. That’s the buzz.” This week, you can also hear essential new music from LAVA LA RUE, Hak Baker, Alfie Templeman and Rachel Chinouriri. Like all the artists featured, Antidote is always evolving—so keep checking back, and if you hear something you like, add it to your library.