Fontaines D.C.’s last album, , saw the Dublin quintet morph into Guitar Hero-style characters, remixing the unbuttoned shirts of post-punk past into something edgy, bold and cool. Sonically, the band retained their penchant for poetic ramblings and verbose hooks, though delivered denser and more expansive instrumentation than any of their previous efforts.

‘Dopamine Chamber’ is the album Fontaines D.C. have been wanting to make. ‘Romance’ was the prelude, an overture that teased at the fantasy of sweeping strings and new wave synthesis, though it retained the guitars-first approach of their first three albums. With ‘Dopamine Chamber’, the band’s fifth full-length, they dive headfirst into all things electronic, cinematic and goth.

“It is quite grotesque, being able to self-prescribe dopamine through your phone,” frontman Grian Chatten says on the album. ‘Dopamine Chamber’ is thematically bleaker and more existential than the band’s prior work. Opener ‘Six Short Morning’ (which may be one of their best tracks to date) and lead single both teem with an intensity not yet heard by Fontaines before; the instrumentals are impenetrable, Chatten’s delivery deliberately strained à la the panicked breaths of ‘Romance’ centrepiece ‘Starburster’.

‘Mimesis’ is a poppier moment of relief from the tension cutting through ‘Dopamine Chamber’, ‘Tongue’ has Chatten hitting a word count over washy percussion, a string section and a and -influenced bassline and piano motif; and penultimate track ‘Japan’, while lyrically a bit twee at points (“You know she is the man, got a boyfriend in Japan”), calls back to ‘Humbug’-era with flecks of and for good measure. It’s an arms-in-the-air, lads-on-shoulders sing-a-long, not quite hitting the level of sullen and murky as the rest of ‘Dopamine Chamber’ but could shape up to be a solid live cut. Catalonian polymath and superstar appears on ‘Where Is Gone?’ – it acts almost like a pseudo-Bond theme, instrumentally sultry yet ambiguous, before shaping into an acoustic guitar-fuelled ballad.

‘Dopamine Chamber’ is Fontaines D.C. rambling about the worst bits of the modern world – environmental collapse, extreme wealth, political violence – over some of the prettiest instrumentals the band have written. The album is inspired just as much by as it is by , and by as it is by . They manage to balance an inherent darkness and obscurity with stunning passages of music and constantly shifting drum sounds, everything incessantly changing and warping throughout the tracklist. The vastness of ‘Romance’ has only been increased, the quintet using their fifth album to commit to full sonic exploration of what Fontaines D.C. is, and what it could be.

8/10

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