“To be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all over your face,” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten told in his typically vivid and poetically unsettling manner on the eve of their last album ‘Romance’. “Every now and again you have to fucking shake them off, just to see who you are again.”
After the neon shock and anti-nostalgia sentiment of the genre-defying ‘Romance’, there were certainly no flies on Dublin’s finest. But then what? A winning formula that turned one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years into a stadium-filling festival headliner would be one for most to stick to, but comfort is rigor mortis for Fontaines. Add to that, the rot of the world itself.
These are bleak times: societal and environmental collapse, the digital world fracturing from reality, horror fatigue, the works. Coming up for air and searching for his muse, Chatten travelled to destinations of “faded grandeur” in Venice, Vienna and Sicily to emerge with a sense of “catastrophic warning” for album five. That quest for escape from the claustrophobia bursts out of the mechanical Depeche Mode death march of opener ‘Six Shot Morning’, a synthy tour through this waking doom-scroll nightmare for “melancholy hearts in a motion film”.
As a mirror to the dopamine hit we get from our devices, the album moves from one intense mind-altering state to another while working as a whole macabre journey. As part of the suite, the cyborg meets symphony balladry of ‘Marianne’ swoons into a “” to “” before the ‘80s synth-pop noir of ‘Mimesis’ sees obsession and unrequited love meet “” in this age where “everybody’s depressed, we’re running on a wheel”, and then ‘Happy For You’ is rock-drenched exorcism of acceptance and letting go.
The band say they swung the pendulum from the more human elements of their sound to more harsh and synthetic extremities to bathe in the corruption that ‘Dopamine Chamber’ explores. Far from the scrappy guitar punk of debut ‘Dogrel’, Fontaines have left it all on the field with an opulent and textured musical tapestry befitting some of Chatten’s most absorbing poetry. This is best showcased by the dizzying trip-hop gloom with a groove of ‘Tongue’ swooning into a swampy Bad Seeds-esque breakdown before a full-on cyber-punk attack, the skittering sci-fi hymn of ‘Intimate’, and the fuzzy-electronica-tinged album highlight ‘Demolition’ complete with the frontman spitting like a twisted Liam Gallager, inviting you to “cosy up to my horror show for the callous-hearted, the pre-departed.”
The record does err back towards the human side. We have ‘You Miss Me’ coming from the Robert Smith playbook of a shadowy spiderweb verse before a flower in bloom chorus, and ‘Japan’ is bittersweet acoustic singalong that floats above the ground and asks “why’d you have to go and make it real?” as Chatten looks upon a one-sided relationship. The breathy and elegiac sun-riser ‘One Man’ gives the album its title and captures its core mission: “dopamine chamber, just trying to kill the pain, you can’t escape the feeling once you’ve given it a name.”
If you were expecting a pop banger via the Rosalía collab ‘Where Is Gone?’, think again – it’s a lovelorn Morricone meets Bond theme ballad that peacefully realises that sometimes “there’s no harm in saying leave it, let it die”. Even ‘Romance’ had the daydream euphoria of ‘Favourite’, but there’s no real light on here despite its Trojan Horse hooks. The album is all the richer for not having a banger shoehorned in. It just goes to show that you can fill out a stadium without shitting out a ‘Sex On Fire’. The gothy tones of The Cure linger and ‘Dopamine Chamber’ would sit comfortably alongside the melancholy moodpieces of ‘Disintegration’ and ‘Pornography’, as well as the future-proof genre-clash and dislocation of Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’.
The biggest Irish band since U2 have now also secured themselves as the definitive band of this decade on ‘Dopamine Chamber’ – an extraordinary record for extraordinary times. Amidst all the hiss and the decay, Fontaines have made something pure, honest and feeling while in exhilarating motion. Now you see who they are.
- Record label: XL Recordings
- Release date: October 16, 2026