What TV Show Is 'Starburster' In? Fontaines D.C.'s Song Is the MobLand Theme

Fontaines D.C.'s 'Starburster' is the opening theme of MobLand, the Paramount+ crime drama starring Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. Season 2 began on 18 September 2026 and puts out a new episode every Friday until the finale on 20 November. Each of those Fridays sends a new wave of viewers looking for the song.

The waves are easy to see. In the eight days before the season began, the English Wikipedia page for 'Starburster' averaged 263 readers a day. On premiere day it had 681. Across the 27 days from the premiere to 14 October, it has averaged 764, almost three times the earlier level, and its busiest day was Saturday 3 October, the day after episode three, with 1,151.

Is 'Starburster' the MobLand theme song?

Yes. MobLand has used 'Starburster' as its opening theme since its first episode on 30 March 2025. The song was not written for the show. The band put it out a year earlier, on 17 April 2024, as the first single from their album Romance, and the series picked it up afterwards.

The reading figures move with the show. The Wikipedia page for MobLand went from about 14,400 readers a day before the premiere to 38,709 on 18 September, and the two pages have risen and fallen together every week since. What has changed is the share. On premiere day the song page had one reader for every 57 on the show's page. On 3 October it had one for every 27, and on 10 October one for every 33. Attention to the show has eased week by week; the song has kept a larger slice of what is left.

'Starburster' on Shazam and Spotify since MobLand came back

Looking the song up grew much faster than playing it. On Spotify's daily UK chart, as logged by kworb.net, 'Starburster' had 75,630 plays on 14 September, four days before the premiere, and 90,982 on 14 October: about a fifth more, or a tenth more if you compare whole weeks. In Ireland, the band's home, it had 17,715 plays on 14 September and 17,407 on 14 October, and its weekly total there has slipped since the premiere. On Shazam, which people open to name a song they have just heard, it was in the top 50 in 20 countries in the charts our radar read late on 15 October (UTC), highest at No. 5 in Hungary and No. 6 in the UK, and it has been in 18 to 23 national top 50s on every day our radar has read those charts since 2 October.

A theme song reaches people every week who did not choose to hear it. Many of them want its name, which is what Shazam and Wikipedia measure. Far fewer go on to play it again, which is what the stream counts measure. We saw this split before, after Ayra Starr's NFL halftime show in London: searches for her name shot up, while views of her song's video kept falling.

What Fontaines D.C.'s 'Starburster' is about

Grian Chatten, the band's singer, has spoken about the panic attack the song grew out of, which 2024 interviews placed at St Pancras station in London. It is built like one. The words come in a rush of short demands, most of them starting with the same two words, and the line people type into search, “I wanna see you alone”, arrives about 40 seconds into the album version. Between the lines are the sharp intakes of breath that make the track easy to recognise from a few seconds of a title sequence.

Our software, which cuts a recording into sections and labels what it hears, ran on the sound of the official video. It hears strings and piano for the first 15 seconds, then drums. Between one minute and one minute 20 seconds its labels include a sigh, which is how it files those gasps. The loudest part starts at about 2:19, where the words come fastest; later the track drops into a slower, chant-like passage before the last loud return. The video adds sound effects of its own, so these times are the video's, not the album version's.

Dopamine Chamber lands on a MobLand Friday

Today, 16 October, Fontaines D.C. release Dopamine Chamber, their fifth album, on XL Recordings, produced by James Ford, who also produced Romance. It is a MobLand Friday too: episode five of the new season is due the same day. Anyone who looks up the theme this weekend will find a new record waiting, with singles such as 'Marianne' already out.

On 14 October Spotify counted about 345,000 plays a day for 'Starburster', 187,941,748 in all. Among the band's songs only 'I Love You', from 2022, was playing more that day. A show can bring a song back into view. Whether it brings listeners back to the band is a question the new album will answer over the coming weeks.

Our bet: on Saturday 21 November, the day after the finale, the 'Starburster' Wikipedia page will have more readers than the 681 it had on premiere day. That is not a safe call. The Saturday peaks have eased, from 1,151 on 3 October to 812 on 10 October, and the finale and the album will both have to pull for it to come true. More on what the world is playing in our music trends section.