Fontaines D.C. guitarist Carlos O’Connell has revealed that the band have already started work on their next album, adding that they’ve already recorded around 11 demos of songs for their next project.

The Dublin band are working on the follow-up to this year’s ‘A Hero’s Death’, which arrived over a year on from their 2019 debut ‘Dogrel’.

Speaking to the Spanish outlet Binaural for their Pedaleras programme, O’Connell recalled how he and bass player Conor Deegan III ended up in lockdown in the west of Ireland together as the coronavirus pandemic took hold earlier this year.

“We went to a small house that a friend of ours had. The plan was: ‘Damn, what’s going on? Let’s be there for a couple of weeks,’” he recalled (quotes translated from Spanish). “And then obviously it was a lot longer than we all thought. We ended up there two months.”

O’Connell said that he and Deegan, much like the other Fontaines members, ended up producing “a lot of demos” during quarantine, meaning that when the band reconvened in London in the summer “we started to share everything we had”.

Fontaines are now “writing every day in the studio” back in Dublin, O’Connell confirmed, “recording demos. There are a lot of really cool things we’ve done. I look forward to seeing where we take them.”

Asked if any of the demos had actually been properly recorded, O’Connell said that the band have “a lot” of demo songs in the pipeline and that Fontaines are now deciding “if we release something else or if we tour with this album [‘A Hero’s Death’]… or if we tour with two albums when possible”.

“We must have about 11 songs recorded,” he said. “We have a list [of] like 35. It’s going much more in the direction of the drum and bass that you hear a little bit on ‘Televised Mind’ and ‘A Lucid Dream’. What Tom [Coll] is playing on drums is incredible.”

O’Connell also said that the songs are sounding “very 90s to me”, citing the likes of The Prodigy, Sinéad O’Connor and Pixies as early points of comparison.

“It’s a different sound, but I think it makes sense where we left off [from] ‘A Hero’s Death’,” he added. “Then we have quite a few songs that are much more ballads. Very traditional. There are two sides of the coin, as we have always done.”

Last month, Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten spoke to NME after the band received their first-ever Grammy nomination, with Chatten saying that receiving the news about their Best Rock Album nomination for ‘A Hero’s Death‘ felt like receiving “a phone call from space, it was that heavy”.