“Being creatively understood by too many people is like flies landing on your clothes and on your face,” said Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten. NME with their typically lively and poetically disturbing manner on the eve of their latest album ‘Romance’. “Every once in a while you have to get rid of it, 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 in the dark about Dublin’s finest. But then what? A winning formula that would make one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years a stadium-filling festival headliner would be one that most would stick to, but comfort is rigor mortis for Fontaines. Add to that the rottenness of the world itself.
These are dark times: societal and environmental collapse, a digital world broken from reality, horror fatigue, the works. Taking to the air and searching for his muse, Chatten traveled to destinations of “faded grandeur” in Venice, Vienna and Sicily only to emerge with a sense of “doomsday warning” for the fifth album. This quest for escape from claustrophobia springs from Depeche Mode’s mechanical death march of opener “Six Shot Morning,” a synthetic tour through this doom-scrolling waking nightmare for “melancholic hearts in an animated film.
Like a mirror of the dose of dopamine we receive from our devices, the album moves from one intense mental state to another while working as a macabre journey. As part of the sequel, the cyborg encounters the symphonic ballad of “Marianne” and vanishes into a “cinematic feeling” has “help you disappear“Before the dark 80s synth-pop of ‘Mimesis’ saw obsession and unrequited love collide”indifference“at that time when”everyone’s depressed, we’re riding on one wheel”, then “Happy For You” is a rocky exorcism of acceptance and letting go.
The band claims to have swung the pendulum from the more human elements of their sound toward harsher, more synthetic ends to bathe in the corruption explored by “Dopamine Chamber.” Far from the disjointed guitar punk of his debut “Dogrel,” Fontaines left it all on the field with an opulent, textured musical tapestry that befits some of Chatten’s most captivating poetry. This is best highlighted by the dizzying sadness of trip-hop with a groove of “Tongue” fading into a swampy Bad Seeds-style breakdown before a full cyber-punk attack, the lurching sci-fi anthem of “Intimate”, and the fuzzy electro-tinged album climax “Demolition” with the frontman spitting like a twisted Liam Gallager, inviting you to “Make yourself comfortable in my horror show for the insensitive, pre-parties.”
The story actually returns to the human side. We have “You Miss Me” from Robert Smith’s playbook, composed of a dark spiderweb verse set before a flower-to-flower chorus, and “Japan” is a bittersweet acoustic chant that floats above the ground and asks “why did you have to go there and make it real?” while Chatten considers a one-sided relationship. The breathless, elegiac sunrise “One Man” gives the album its title and captures its central mission: “dopamine chamber, just trying to kill the pain, you can’t escape this feeling once you give it a name.»
If you were expecting a pop hit via Rosalía’s collaboration “Where Is Gone?” “, make no mistake: it’s a love ballad on the theme of Morricone and Bond which peacefully realizes that sometimes “There’s nothing wrong with saying leave it, let it die“Even ‘Romance’ had the dreamy euphoria of ‘Favourite’, but there’s no real light here despite its Trojan horse hooks. The album is all the richer for having no Radio-X banger came on the scene. It just goes to show that you can fill a stadium without shitting out a “Sex On Fire.” The gothic tones of The Cure linger and “Dopamine Chamber” sit comfortably alongside the melancholy ambient tracks of “Disintegration” and “Pornography,” as well as the genre clash and time-tested dislocation of Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine.”
The biggest Irish band since U2 also established themselves as the definitive band of this decade on ‘Dopamine Chamber’ – an extraordinary record for extraordinary times. Amidst all the hiss and decadence, Fontaines created something pure, honest, and emotional while still being in exhilarating motion. Now you see who they are.
Details
- Record company: XL Records
- Release date: October 16, 2026
Gn entert
