When Fontaines D.C. first came out of Dublin with their 2019 debut, Dogrel, they were a fun new twist on old-school post-punk. The spelunking bass lines recalled Joy Division and New Order, the jagged guitars evoked the Fall. But these guys had their own
uniquely Irish sense of lyricism, absurdist humor, and underdog spirit. You’d have to be a real spoil sport not to fall for a band whose frontman, Grian Chatten, told Rolling Stone U.K. that he likes to relax before shows by listening to the audiobook of James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Each subsequent Fontaines record has been different and more ambitious, and they really hit a peak with their 2024 LP, Romance, expanding their sound into heavy Nineties alt-rock and industrial, Britpop, and a dream-rock canon from Cocteau Twins to Deftones to Lana Del Rey, while delivering sweeping, hard-hitting reflections on how to stay sane and maybe even hopeful in these increasingly dark times.
Their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, has a similar world-building spirit. The band is reaching further beyond its guitar-rock foundations, pushing deeper into electronic moodiness and orchestral sweep in songs that feel more designed than banged out. But this time around the world is one of doom on all sides. The record opens with the ominous low-end churn of “Six Shot Morning.” Chatten sings in a dank baritone about Silicon Valley siphoning our very beings, before offering a line that turns the transhumanist ideology of tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel into ironic pop-ballad poetry: “You and I living for a million years/Always, always.”
What follows is a rock album with the heart of a dystopian sci-fi epic. Fontaines are not a band that thinks small. Chatten says he took inspiration for Dopamine Chamber from time he spent in Venice, Italy, pondering the way great civilizations can give way to decay. On the spacious, slamming single “Marianne,” the snare drum hits like a falling anvil, a string section broods, and synths throb like a hangover as Chatten whispers, “You can follow my lead/I can help you disappear,” an escapist invitation that feels more like a threat than a promise. Yet, the result is still catchy enough for a drunk pub singalong. “Mimesis” is an Eighties synth-pop reverie that offers dire empathy, while “Demolition” pummels and brays like In Utero-era Nirvana and gear-grinds like vintage Nine Inch Nails, as we’re offered the appealing proposal “Cozy up to my/Horror show for the/Callous-hearted, the/Predeparted.”
If our impending AI extermination provides a backdrop for much of this album, Fontaines D.C. certainly aren’t letting the end of all things slow down their musical progress. “One Man” builds a dream-pop cathedral, awe-inspiring in its intricately latticed melodic grandeur. “Tongue” sets teeming, agitated synth chirps atop slow, funky bad-dream drum thwack that sounds like it was recorded in a meat locker, before a head-bobbing piano figure rolls through that sounds like it was borrowed from a gritty 1990s New York hip-hop record. The album’s headline artistic coup is “Where Is Gone?,” a duet in which Chatten is joined by Rosalía for a velvet-sunset ballad that goes down like a 2020s spin on the languorous Sixties epics of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.
They end the album on “Intimate,” a swirly slo-mo apocalypse of a track that unfolds like an all-ages goth night in the boiler room of Dante’s Inferno. The lyrics offer images of the uber rich pioneering their own eugenic happy place (“Beauty kings/Beauty queens/Razor-faced/With private means”) as the rest of us poor suckers are left to rot amid “the ruins of the human dream.” But Fontaines aren’t going out like that, at least not yet. As the music slips deeper into its enveloping blackness, they keep reaching out, repeating the refrain “Intimately on your side/Intimate all through the night” like a last-ditch benediction. It’s a harrowing way to close out an album that hits just right for our nightmare times.
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