Sometimes, Conor Deegan III wishes he had a 9-to-5 job.

“To come home to a kid and actually be there for him,” says the bassist for Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. “I don’t want to be an absentee dad.”

But he’s not a dad yet – and rock ‘n’ roll calls. An international tour of the band’s third album Skinty Fia will draw the Dublin five-piece led by Grian Chatten to Australia in February next year.

The album is imbued with the alienating experience of attempting to make a home in foreign places. Deegan, 28, and his bandmates, including drummer Tom Coll and guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley are all expats.

Deegan, who is currently between gigs in Malmo, Sweden, moved to Paris in the summer of 2020. “We were always the kind of people who romanticise Ireland, romanticise Dublin,” he says. “We wanted to hold on to whatever things we could, even though we’d left Ireland itself and moved to England, France, New York and wherever. It’s the thing of, what can you hold on and bring with you and what do you want to leave behind? That’s largely what this album is about. It is an album of expats, you know, of emigrants.”

Ireland, for the band, is a lover, a nurturer, sacred to their identities. Ireland is, as the title of their opening track conveys In ár gCroíthe go deo,“In our hearts forever” (the song refers to a true story of Irish expat Bernadette Martin who wanted the Gaelic words inscribed on her mother’s gravestone in England, but the church insisted on adding an English translation – she has called the song “stunningly haunting”).

Deegan – who dreams of starting a family – moved again, to London, two months ago, but he’d barely had time to absorb it before touring pulled him from home. It’s been non-stop work since the band’s 2019 debut album Dogrel, a critically acclaimed, Mercury Prize-nominated, blistering affair, earning them comparisons to IDLES and Joy Division. Their poetic, bleak and beautiful second album A Hero’s Death in 2020 won a Grammy Award nomination.

“We had an ambition, after our second album, which was to show what we could do outside the ‘post-punk’ box… we’d always written songs that were ballads, a bit slower, [and] we wanted to show that we could do that with the second album. What that led to was an album that was quite sprawling in tone and [made us] kind of difficult to recognise. We wanted a record that was much more consistent.”

Skinty Fia is rock’n’roll with a warm, beating heart. It was influenced, Deegan says, by Primal Scream’s classic XTRMNTR, Kim Deal’s Pixies basslines, and English DJ Roni Size.