Dopamine Chamber, the fifth album by Fontaines D.C., is fueled by a hardwired sense of sadism. The general thrust of the album is right there in the title, but frontman Grian Chatten is savvy enough to know that screaming “phone bad” is just another performance, like how governments keep blowing past their carbon emission targets, or how all the AI companies are in agreement that somebody should put some limits on this thing. So rather than make an angry record about technology, or a scary one with the sad impotence of a Black Mirror episode, Fontaines have made a seductive one: a sleek stadium-rock record that sparkles like a lab-grown diamond the size of your fist. It whispers directly to its listener, promises we can live “for a million years,” that “you can go on dreaming”—and that maybe the best thing to do before oblivion is dissociate with a finely crafted pop song.
By its end, Dopamine Chamber has promised you the world and hollowed you out, leaving you in the kind of blue-light shame familiar to camgirl addicts or online gamblers: If Chatten and co. push one idea on this album, it’s that most of us have padded ourselves with vices to the point that it’s hard to process much of anything anymore. But before they steal your watch, Fontaines have the good manners to show you a few unreal landscapes: Dopamine Chamber evokes ice palaces ruled by hostile monarchs, palatial pan-European jazz clubs, romantic holidays set against the apocalypse. Forget the all-in-this-together spirit that stadium-rock bands, which Fontaines now emphatically are, are supposed to dish out by the truckload: This is cruel, beautiful feel-bad music.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Bass player Conor Deegan has said that Dopamine Chamber stems, at least in part, from the question: Where do you escape to? True to that, its gorgeously rendered songs can feel a little like potemkin villages masking darker environments. It also emphatically answers the question of the band’s last couple of years: What’s the point of Fontaines D.C. in a stadium setting? The five-piece’s 2024 record Romance was a commercial success in the UK and Ireland, but a stark departure from the soused 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 rapturous, a far cry from the seamy, hyperliterary world of 2022’s Skinty Fia. Chatten’s writing had not lost its essence—that of a witty, wired omniscient narrator—but the album itself didn’t necessarily leave Fontaines any room to grow.
