Behind the Covers
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“Irish music”

4 cover stories in our archive

Behind the Covers' archive includes 4 album covers documented under the "Irish music" design theme, spanning the 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the rock, alternative tradition and features work by Fontaines D.C.. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.

Romance by Fontaines D.C. — album cover art

Romance by Fontaines D.C. (2024)

The cover of Romance announces a new Fontaines D.C. before a note is heard. Its neon color and unsettling illustration belong to a world of fantasy, dread and exaggerated emotion rather than the archival Irish imagery associated with the band's earliest records. The shift is deliberate: by 2024 the group was interested in a wider, stranger visual language.

Label
XL Recordings
Designer
Carlos O'Connell and Texas Maragh (art direction and design)
Genre
Rock, Alternative
Decade
2020s
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Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C. — album cover art

Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C. (2022)

A deer stands inside a house, stranded beneath a red light. It is an arresting image for Skinty Fia, Fontaines D.C.'s third album, because the animal seems both majestic and terribly out of place. The cover makes a familiar domestic hallway feel threatening, as though something from an older landscape has wandered into a world that no longer has room for it.

Label
Partisan Records
Genre
Rock, Alternative
Decade
2020s
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A Hero's Death by Fontaines D.C. — album cover art

A Hero's Death by Fontaines D.C. (2020)

For A Hero's Death, Fontaines D.C. chose a sculpture that already carried a century of Irish history. Oliver Sheppard's depiction of the dying Cú Chulainn shows the legendary warrior bound to a standing stone, holding himself upright in defiance even as his life ebbs away. Reproduced in blue, the figure turns the band's second album into an encounter with endurance, sacrifice and the complicated uses of national myth.

Label
Partisan Records
Designer
Charlie Drinkwater
Genre
Rock, Alternative
Decade
2020s
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Dogrel by Fontaines D.C. — album cover art

Dogrel by Fontaines D.C. (2019)

The cover of Fontaines D.C.'s debut album Dogrel looks backwards before the music even begins. A figure caught in a moment of performance occupies a photograph taken by Bruce Davidson at Duffy & Sons circus in Ireland in 1967. Its shadows and vulnerability give the image a human unease that fits a band writing about Dublin without turning the city into a postcard.

Label
Partisan Records
Designer
Matt de Jong
Photographer
Bruce Davidson
Genre
Rock, Alternative
Decade
2010s
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