XL Recordings MD Ben Beardsworth has told Music Week that Fontaines DC are on the “cusp of something really significant” in terms of their global reach.
The band play their biggest headline show to date at the weekend (July 5) with a sold-out 45,000-capacity Finsbury Park gig in London.
It follows the global impact of Fontaines DC’s current album, Romance, the biggest independent release of 2024 in the UK. The band’s fourth studio album is still going strong more than 10 months since its release and has spent 42 weeks in the UK Top 75. It has sales to date of 194,984 (Official Charts Company).
Romance is also their first album since moving to XL Recordings from Partisan. Although they missed out on No.1 in a competitive week, peaking at No.2, it is now their biggest-selling album.
The success of the campaign contributed to XL Recordings winning Independent Record Company at the Music Week Awards in May, where we caught up with Beardsworth.
“It was really exciting to see a band seize the moment,” said Ben Beardsworth. “You could tell from the record, from the way they presented the record, from the way they presented themselves and from the way they played, as well as from the places they're playing, that they've just turned everything up – and that's a really exciting thing to watch.”
Ben Beardsworth (far left) and the XL Recordings team at the Music Week Awards 2025 (photo: Will Ireland)
Significantly, Fontaines DC have achieved strong results across physical music but also streaming, live and radio. Romance’s consumption in the UK is slightly more than 50% from streaming (50.7%) and (46.4%) from physical, with the remainder from downloads.
With the recent release of a deluxe edition of the album, Fontaines DC cracked the Top 40 with a new track, It’s Amazing To Be Young (No.39).
Unusually for a rock act, the band have established a presence in the singles chart Top 100 with five tracks from the album. In their career to date, Fontaines DC have so far racked up six silver-certified singles (200,000 units), led by Romance’s lead single Starburster on 323,885 units.
The band have 5.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify where their biggest track is Starburster (81.2 million streams), followed by 2022’s I Love You (75.7m streams) and Favourite (56.4 m streams), the second single from Romance.
XL Recordings’ in-house team was closely involved in the creative side of what has been a visually distinctive campaign.
“We did what we always try and do, and that is to just amplify an artist's vision,” said Beardsworth. “They came with quite an ambitious vision, and we've got a great team of people that work in that area, and they work together.”
In the States in particular, they are on the cusp of something really significant
Ben Beardsworth
Fontaines DC are now in the midst of a busy summer of UK touring and European festival dates, including four of their own headline shows in Britain – London Finsbury Park (July 5), Newcastle Exhibition Park (July 13), Cardiff Castle (July 30) and Manchester Wythenshawe Park (August 15) – for 100,000 fans in total. They also play a festival show at Trnsmt in Glasgow (July 12).
The group’s European festivals include Rock Werchter in Belgium (July 3), Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands (August 17) and Rock en Seine in Paris (August 24).
Their busy summer schedule follows their 24-date North American tour, which culminated in three sold-out shows at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom in May. The Irish band have also toured Asia and Australia.
Beardsworth said he is hoping to see “more growth” for Fontaines DC.
“It's happening everywhere in the world, and in the States in particular, they are on the cusp of something really significant,” he told Music Week. “We can see that they're getting new audiences at their shows. It's a really exciting moment for them.”
Following the Music Week Awards win, of which he said he was “very proud”, the XL boss also took the opportunity to praise fellow indies. The label was up against labels in the Independent Record Company category including Communion Records, Concord, Defected Records, Dirty Hit, EGA Distro, Empire, Heavenly Recordings, Modern Sky UK, NQ Records Partisan Records and The Other Songs Group.
“Independent music seems to be in a pretty great state of health to me,” he said. “There’s lots of great music coming through the independents.”
PHOTO: Kido Mafon
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