Fontaines D.C. return to Spain in August for a four-show mini-tour across three cities. The Andalusian stop gets two nights: 8 and 9 August at Cádiz's Baluarte de la Candelaria, both already sold out. They then play El Muelle Live at the Port of Alicante on the 11th and Pamplona's Ciudadela on the 13th. Houston Party is behind all four dates.
There is something fitting about Madrid and Barcelona being left off the itinerary while Cádiz becomes the tour's stronghold. The city that turns humour into a way of life has taken Fontaines D.C. most seriously: it is the only stop with two nights. The first sold out in five minutes, Coldplay-style; the second was announced in a rush and sold out too. There is also the wonderfully unlikely setting: a few hundred people inside a seventeenth-century bastion, in the palm-filled courtyard where carnival chirigotas ring out every February.
After Spain, the Irish band move on to something much bigger: Reading and Leeds, where they top the 2026 bill alongside Charli XCX, Dave, Florence + the Machine and Raye.
Anyone who catches them in Cádiz or Alicante will see them in a palm-filled courtyard or on a harbour pier, just weeks before they play to tens of thousands in England. It is worth squeezing them into the summer calendar—and feeling genuinely fortunate to be there.
Romance, their fourth album, is still the driving force. Released by XL in August 2024 and produced by James Ford, it reached number two in the UK and earned two Grammy nominations, including one for Starburster, a song Grian Chatten drew from a panic attack at St Pancras station. It is not a clean break so much as a shift: less back-alley post-punk, more electronics, more shadow and more melody. It is the record on which the band changed scale and grew into something bigger.
At their recent shows—including Finsbury Park in summer 2025—they drew from all four albums, from Boys in the Better Land to Starburster. But the band have said they want to disrupt the script and revive older material. August therefore remains something of a mystery, which is part of the fun.
Where they came from says plenty about who they are. They met in Dublin through poetry before guitars and published two poetry collections before recording a note. That helps explain the title of their debut, Dogrel (2019), named after a form of popular verse, and Grian Chatten's delivery, which is often closer to recitation than conventional singing. The band took their name from Johnny Fontane, the singer in The Godfather, adding “D.C.” for Dublin City. One final thread connects this unusual Spanish tour: guitarist Carlos O'Connell grew up in Madrid.