Dopamine ChamberFontaines DC’s fifth album, is fueled by a deep-rooted feeling of sadism. The general thrust of the album is there in the title, but frontman Grian Chatten is savvy enough to know that shouting “bad phone” is just another performance, like how governments continue to exceed their carbon emissions targets, or how all AI companies agree that someone should put limits on this thing. So rather than making an angry record about technology, or frightening with the sad impotence of a Black mirror episode, Fontaines made a seductive one: a sleek stadium-rock record that sparkles like a lab diamond the size of your fist. He whispers directly to his listener, promises that we can live “for a million years”, that “we can keep dreaming” – and that perhaps the best thing to do before oblivion is to dissociate ourselves from a finely crafted pop song.
At its end, Dopamine Chamber promised you the world and drained you of its substance, leaving you in the kind of blue-light shame familiar to camgirl addicts or online gamers: If Chatten and co. One idea on this album is that most of us have stuffed ourselves with vices to the point where it’s now difficult to deal with anything. But before stealing your watch, the Fontaines have the know-how to help you discover some unreal landscapes: Dopamine Chamber evokes ice palaces ruled by hostile monarchs, sumptuous pan-European jazz clubs, romantic vacations against the apocalypse. Forget the all-inclusive spirit that stadium rock bands, which Fontaines now emphatically are, are supposed to pump out by the truckload: this is cruel and beautiful music of unease.
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Bassist Conor Deegan said that Dopamine Chamber arises, at least in part, from the question: where to escape? True to this, its beautifully rendered songs can sound a bit like Potemkin villages masking darker environments. It also powerfully answers the question that the group has asked itself in recent years: what is the point of Fontaines DC in a stadium setting? The quintet’s 2024 record Romance was a commercial success in the UK and Ireland, but a radical departure from the tainted post-punk of their first three records as Chatten, Deegan and bandmates Conor Curley, Tom Coll and Carlos O’Connell took inspiration from Britpop, Lana Del Rey and the Cure. The sound was big and delightful, far from the sordid and hyperliterary world of 2022 Skinny Fia. Chatten’s writing hadn’t lost its essence – that of an omniscient, witty narrator – but the album itself didn’t necessarily give Fontaines room to grow.
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