Grian Chatten, the lead voice of Irish outfit Fontaines D.C., released this solo album while I was sitting on a sleeper train travelling through the Slovakian countryside. It has meant more to me than most other things that have ever entered my ears, and I’m not exactly sure why.

It’s cosmic, it’s honest, it’s Irish. Ok. But Beyond that, the fondness for it seems to run too deep to be deciphered.

I’m not alone in knowing that Chatten’s lyrics capture an innate existential questioning, a certain depressive anger, a poetic sense of humour that runs throughout the Irish sensibility. And it feels almost cliched to resonate with it so closely. But I’d be outright lying if I said it doesn’t always profoundly move me.

There’s a fable quality to the idea of modern life in the way Chatten paints it. Ireland is treated as the closest place to the stars, to some higher immaterial dimension, to a more cosmic space? And yet this treatment doesn’t feel forced or pretentious. It feels, to me, more like how a stand-up comedian can present cutting and nuanced observations that seem so obvious only after they’ve been pointed out.

When I first heard the song East Coast Bed I felt an energy contract at the top of my stomach and my teeth start to grind. Once again, I have no idea why. The opening lyrics are certainly an image ripe to be resonated with, but it’s like this was the song of my childhood that never existed. It was an intrinsic and immediate kinship. And I still, after the five hundredth time of hearing the bloody song, lean forward slightly and tense my jaw like I’m gearing up to defend everything I’ve ever believed in.

There’s some kind of magic baked into the music that makes me want to cry and shout and punch a fucking wall or something I don’t know. I mean, what is that? Yearning? But for what? To fully exist? Well that just sounds like a pretentious sentence said only to sound interesting.

But there has to be something to it? Right? I didn’t live this life, but I did. I couldn’t care less and I’m fucking furious. When I hear this album, despite being calmer than most Fontaines’ records, it’s like I am being reminded of some raging passion that I’d completely forgotten about.

Perhaps there’s a chance that all of this is just a way in which my mind is trying to make tangible the vague and shifting emotions at my growing core. Grabbing onto the yearning energy of this album like a lifeline, so that I might begin to understand more of why I am how I am. But do I even want to? I have absolutely no fucking idea whatsoever.