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Fontaines D.C.’s fifth album ‘Dopamine Chamber’ finds the Dublin band moving away from their earlier guitar sound towards colder electronics, samples, marching drums and flashes of 1960s Italian pop. Several songs dispense with guitars entirely as the band pursue what guitarist Conor Curley describes as music that points towards the future.
The sound of a band moving decisively away from the guitar language of their early records into something colder, stranger and more synthetic. “Dopamine Chamber” arrives like a constellation behind undulating sighs of smog: Potent balladry, anthemic melodies glinting through the murk. In a world tipping towards collapse, it asks how pleasure mutates amid peril — and what our pursuit of it reveals about us.
Across the album, Fontaines D.C. — Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll — move between gratification and dread until the two meld together, reflecting the overwhelm of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence all riding the same algorithms as memes, jokes and celebrity culture. “The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” says Chatten.
“Tongue” is taken from Fontaines D.C.’s new album “Dopamine Chamber”, out 16th October:
