Grian Chatten – Puppet

Grian Chatten has been having a busy stretch beyond Fontaines D.C. — solo debut Chaos For The Fly in 2023, a recent collaboration with Damon Albarn and Kae Tempest for the War Child charity album HELP(2), and now the lead single from the official Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man soundtrack. “Puppet” is that single, written and recorded with longtime Peaky Blinders composers Antony Genn and Martin Slattery, and it’s a strong fit for the universe it’s soundtracking.

Dark, slow-building post-rock with synths circling Chatten’s voice throughout, “Puppet” has much of the same eerie weight as Romance — Fontaines’ Mercury Prize-nominated 2024 album — but with an added cinematic stillness. Chatten spent time watching and rewatching scenes from the film during the writing process. “It’s an interesting thing to not spoil or over narrate a scene and to allow the pictures to speak for themselves”, he says. “It was a bit of a balancing act”. Cillian Murphy, who reprises his role as Tommy Shelby in the film, put it simply when speaking with BBC Radio 1: “The Fontaines music seems to work. It has that outlaw and dangerous quality… it just clicked for us”.

The full 36-track soundtrack drops March 6 via Milan Records, same day the film hits select cinemas (Netflix March 20). Beyond “Puppet”, Chatten contributes heavily — a Massive Attack cover of “Angel”, a collaboration with Lankum on “Hunting The Wren (The Immortal Man Version)”, and several other co-written score pieces alongside Genn and Slattery. Fontaines bandmates Carlos O’Connell and Tom Coll also appear, as does Amy Taylor of Amyl & the Sniffers on an original recording.