Silence 4

Fonseca's musical career started with a band called Silence 4, formed by a group of hometown friends. They first released the unpredictable Silence Becomes It, in June 1998 that was a huge success at the time, selling 250,000 copies (the equivalent to six platinum records). This was a remarkable achievement in the Portuguese musical scene, where it is usually difficult to sell these many copies. The album has only two songs written in Portuguese. One of them is "Sexto Sentido", featuring the popular Portuguese singer, Sérgio Godinho. To complete this great year for the band, which played at most of the Portuguese Summer festivals, they closed the world-famous exhibition Expo '98 in Lisbon, playing for about 50 thousand people. Later in the same year, in December, Silence 4 was the first national band to sell out at Pavilhão Atlântico, performing to an astonishing 18,000-strong crowd, only 6 months after the release of their first album. Two years after the "phenomenon" the second album was released, Only Pain Is Real, in July 2000, selling approximately 100,000 copies to this day. The respective tour ended in a double concert at the legendary stage in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, the Coliseu dos Recreios, which sold out completely and was released later on in CD and in DVD format. Throughout 2000, Silence 4 went on their last tour. In 2001, the band entered an undetermined hiatus, that still remains.

Solo career

Fonseca's solo career kicked off the 21st century with a different sound from Silence 4. In his first solo work Sing Me Something New, recorded in 2003,^[2] Fonseca sang and played nearly all the instruments, exploring a totally new environment of sounds on his own. The album was recorded in the studios of producer Mário Barreiros, and later in the Sterling Sound Studios in New York City, by the well-known sound engineer, George Marino, who participated in some of the recordings of Coldplay, the Rollins Band, The Dandy Warhols and Sepultura, among many others. The first single was Someone That Cannot Love which debuted on about 150 Portuguese radio stations in a coordinated release: they were all played on 10 March at midnight. It soon reached #2 on the National Sales Chart and was certified Gold. The tour supporting this first record was extensive; it included many big music venues and large festivals across Portugal.

Our Hearts Will Beat As One, his second solo album, is said by Fonseca himself to be "scarily personal" and was only released in the fall of 2005 because of the other projects that Fonseca was involved in between his two albums. The first single was Who Are U?, described by Fonseca as "the song I always wanted to write". It reached No. 3 on the Portuguese charts. Our Hearts Will Beat As One was critically acclaimed by the media and was considered pop album of the year in Portugal, even before the end of the year. The album went straight to No. 1 on the National Sales Chart and reached Gold status on its first week of sales.

In October 2007, his third original album, Dreams in Colour, was released and the first single was Superstars II, a song that obtained substantial airplay due to a cellphone campaign that adopted the single.

In July 2009, the first single ("A Cry 4 Love") was finally released to the public. The new album, Between Waves, was out on 2 November 2009. On the same day, Fonseca's online community, Amazing Cats Club started working.

Fonseca's fourth album entitled Seasons:Rising was released 21 March 2012. The first single What Life Is For came up on 4 February 2012.

Humanos

In 2004, David joined a new project called Humanos. The idea behind it was to record some unpublished songs by the famous Portuguese artist, a singer-songwriter, from the 1980s, António Variações. David Fonseca, Manuela Azevedo (the lead singer of another Portuguese music group, Clã), Camané (one of the most famous Portuguese "fadistas"), Sérgio Nascimento (a member of Sérgio Godinho’s band), Hélder Gonçalves (also from Clã), Nuno Rafael and João Cardoso are the seven members of a group that would become a huge success, something unseen in the Portuguese music scene. The eponymous album scored an impressive quintuple platinum, staying for weeks at No. 1. "Muda de Vida", "Maria Albertina" and "Rugas" are just some of the group's hits.

All this culminated in three sold-out concerts, two of them in "Coliseu dos Recreios" (Lisbon) and the other in Porto. There was also another memorable performance, in front of a crowd of 40,000 people, at the "Sudoeste" Portuguese Festival, in the year 2005. The Humanos were always intended to be a short project, because there were few unpublished António Variações’ songs. Thus, the CD and DVD with the recorded Coliseums’ live concerts, which was released in November 2006, marked the end of the Humanos project.

Studio albums

as part of Silence 4

• 1998: Silence Becomes It
• 2000: Only Pain Is Real

as part of Humanos

• 2004: Humanos

Solo

Others

Christmas CDs

Live albums

as part of Silence 4

• 2004: Ao Vivo - Coliseu dos Recreios
• 2014: SongBook Live 2014

as part of Humanos

• 2006: Humanos Ao Vivo

solo

Compilation albums

DVDs

• 2008: Dreams in Colour Live
• 2009: Streets of Lisbon - Acoustic Live Sessions (Bonus-DVD with Between Waves CD)
• 2011: Christmas 2011 DVD [Between Waves Tour @ Coliseu do Porto]

Singles