Fontaines D.C put on a festival of colour with Disguise at biggest shows to date
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Over four critically-acclaimed albums, Irish post-punk act Fontaines D.C. have gone from new boys on the block to one of the biggest touring bands in Europe today. Over the summer of 2025, the band played some of their most high-profile festival shows to date, culminating in a sold-out headline set in front of 45,000 people in London’s Finsbury Park.
Award-winning London-based video design agency FRAY Studio were approached by the band to deliver the vibrant visuals that would become an integral part of the summer’s performances. Disguise was selected to help deliver adaptable workflows that could change from stage to stage, with two GX 3 media servers ensuring that the sheer volume of data traffic could be handled while delivering a seamless experience for the audience.
The Challenge
Since their debut in 2019, Fontaines D.C. have built a fierce reputation for their live sets. But their biggest summer as a band presented plenty of challenges, as their tour took them across Europe for live shows and appearances at high-profile festivals including Primavera Sound, Roskilde and TRNSMT. At the heart of the festival season was a headline appearance at Finsbury Park in London.
The band had a clear idea of what they wanted FRAY Studio to deliver, drawing on their existing visual identity while incorporating bold colours and live camera effects to make the most of the band’s stage presence and energy on the big screen.
“It was important to us that the visuals felt aligned with the band’s existing brand,” says Kira O’Brien, Creative Technologist at FRAY Studio. “We had to ensure that we were creating something new and exciting, but not distracting from Fontaines DC’s performance.”
The brief meant using vibrant duotone colour schemes in harsh contrast with strong blacks. Through face tracking and NVIDIA background removal, FRAY Studio planned to use live camera effects that would keep the audience engaged with the performance while adding a colourful intensity to the show. But these effects, as well as the many variations of Notch tools used, would risk pushing many media servers to their limits.
The nature of the tour, which included festival performances and headline shows, created additional challenges for the team. The band played without a timecode and wanted to be able to change their setlist from gig to gig, meaning it would be impossible to create a single workflow that worked across every show. Each venue also presented different stages and screen arrangements that needed to be accounted for. At Primavera Sound, the IMAG screens were positioned in a portrait orientation, in sharp contrast to every other stage on the tour. Looking for a flexible and powerful solution that could meet their requirements, FRAY Studios turned to Disguise.
The Solution
Disguise’s GX 3 server was the cornerstone to FRAY Studios’ response to the challenges ahead. The media server, which has previously been used by fellow Irish rockers U2 for their pioneering residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, offers a 100GbE bandwidth and 12G video capture - powerful enough to ensure it is more than prepared to handle even the most taxing of touring productions. The GX 3 ensured that the team behind the show could deliver face-tracking and live AI background removal that could be relied on to look flawless throughout the band's high-energy performances.
Working with Disguise also enabled FRAY Studios to make the most of Disguise’s simple and intuitive workflows on Designer. This would prove vital for a summer of touring where a single lighting director would operate the entirety of the show’s visual elements.
“Disguise’s Designer software allowed us to build the show in a way where the set list can be altered and adapted from show to show,” says O’Brien. “With full artnet/DMX control, any song can be triggered at any time.” Disguise’s seamless integration with Notch meant that the team could make the most of the five days of production rehearsals, which began just eight weeks after FRAY Studio’s initial conversation with the band. While Fontaines DC ran through their songs, O’Brien’s team could alter looks and try new ideas in the moment, empowering the band to give live feedback to their changes.
With their designs in place, the team at FRAY Studios turned to their final challenge: adapting the show to each of the venues the band would perform at over the course of the tour. Each stage had a different set-up, and at festivals, these configurations were non-negotiable.
“We had to create a solution to allow for the video director to change between different pieces of content made for the various aspect ratios and then manually scale the content where needed,” O’Brien explains. “Disguise made this possible with the built-in expression variable device, which was easily linked to multiple video layers for global control. We were also able to create a range of feed maps to cater for different screen setups and configurations, including one song where each of the screens outputs a different camera feed.”
The Result
The pinnacle of the tour was the band’s sold-out London date in front of 45,000 people. In this setting, the impact of the bold approach to digital stage design was impossible to ignore. The crowd soaked up the kinetic live video, lit bright with colour and bursting at the seams with energy.
In the days after the show, reviews pitched the band as an inevitable headliner for a future Glastonbury festival - and at Finsbury Park, Fontaines D.C. showed that they know what it takes to deliver every element of a performance for the ages.
Image credits: Andrew Whitton & Anthony Mooney
Having worked with Disguise on many shows we have a level of understanding of its true capabilities. It was the right tool for the job for this show and allowed us to work dynamically and efficiently.
Creative Technologist, FRAY Studios