Joel Thornton

The Fontaines DC of today are not the same band I first heard drunk at a garden party in 2019, when the frenetic guitars and snarky charm of ‘Boys in the Better Land’ made me imagine what it might have been like had I been old enough to catch the initial wave of hype around the Arctic Monkeys back in 2006. Instead, I was wasting my time being in Year 5 and having a bowl cut.

It did feel like being at the threshold of something, in a way I’ve rarely felt when it comes to music. Fontaines were something special.

A year later, when the world was very different, I wrote a review of their follow-up, A Hero’s Death: a gloomy and pensive album that captured me and my then sensibilities even more so than the previous one. The pub-ready, scrappy garage-rock was gone, the party was over.

The band soundtracked my twenties, and in 2024, the most obvious thing in the world happened when fourth outing Romance catapulted them to superstardom. All of a sudden I was hearing them in shops and on nights out, seeing their t-shirts everywhere I went. Go on the lads.

Of course, millions of new eyes and ears in your direction can only conjure new feelings, new weight and responsibility, new problems. There’s now a sizeable percentage of your audience gained from one thing, one sound- one a little new to Fontaines themselves. Expectations are through the roof.

I’ve got a feeling I might know what I’m in for at the foot of the Dopamine Chamber.

Breaking it down

Opener ‘Six Shot Morning’ is keen to brandish its sparkly synths, while frontman Grian Chatten growls his best Stephin Meritt along the floor of the track. The lyrics cut around from situation to situation like an anthology film, all observations and reveries but never too close: physically nor emotionally.

“You and I living for a million years, always” seem to be the magic words, and a rush of energy pushes forth, realising the potential of another indie floor filler in a catalogue full of them.

Lead single ‘Marianne’ delves further into detachment – the idea of ‘playing the part’ of oneself – and is delivered with the sense of urgency we’re only capable of when offering advice we should heed ourselves. By design, it’s hard to know what is and what isn’t, who’s doing the sleepwalking in this winding narrative from verse to verse. The only certainty is a desperate call to reunion in the fog.

‘Mimesis’ is a little tired, and its final refrain hits too close melodically to the one in ‘Six Shot Morning’ for me, sans the rush that saved it. Like everybody else, there’s limits to my apathy. At a certain point, you have to get out of bed.

There’s some heavy guitar spots on ‘Happy For You’ that get me mourning an era of Fontaines DC I was certain we’d get following A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia, where these 80s goth tendencies started sprouting. As the band evolved over its first three records, the big ’emotional weight’ songs became more grandiose and corrosive, these moments ever more justified in the bigger picture painted. I’m perhaps a touch too involved with those projects not to feel this way, to not be dying for another heart punch like ‘I Love You’, but one this side of everything they’ve learned in composition and production to date. This is a track of flirtation for me, and I want Fontaines to commit.

‘Tongue’ is a difficult one to pin down. It has a very odd structure and really heavy reverb, as if you’re listening to a rehearsal from the back of a big room. It has a dreamlike quality to it, pushed further by a 15-second span right before the two-minute mark, where it sounds as though Nas’ ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ is being improvised from memory. It shouldn’t fit, and yet it slides right in.

‘Where is Gone?’ (surprisingly featuring Spanish pop megastar ROSALÍA) is a moody and patient duet almost gift-wrapped to be a Bond theme. Both singers establish themselves in their own verses before the central balladeering begins, and the contrast of both vocalists’ registers that permeates the chorus makes the song gorgeous in both tone and sentimentality.

‘Japan’ is the spangly tale of a woman in a shit relationship. Once again we’re presented with a character who feels like a passenger in their own life, disillusioned to the point of powerlessness. This is the exact kind of track I was looking for in place of ‘Mimesis’ to be honest – something that still hits on all the thematic through-lines built across Dopamine Chamber, but where the sonic approach is different enough for both variety and pacing purposes. I should say, it’s phenomenal work. It’s also an incredibly fucked up song to be humming around the house all week, but here we are. The begging chorus of “Why’d you go and make it real?” feels tailor-made as a representative statement for the album, one full of half-dreams and wistfulness.

‘Intimate’ is a dud for me, unfortunately saved for the end of an otherwise interesting collection. It’s as bold in direction as any of the other high points here, but it completely whiffs for me. It seems undeservingly large, a purpose-built closer that evokes very little. Any chance we could get ROSALÍA back in here?

Exiting the chamber

I’m sure you noticed I didn’t gush about Romance in my intro, when I did about everything else in the catalogue. This is because despite its success, it was something of a desynchronisation point for me and the band. It wasn’t just that it was poppier than I go to them for, it’s that it was entirely too safe. ‘Starburster’, ‘Here’s The Thing’ and ‘Favourite’ still make the ordinary rotation but everything else from that record fell away as fast as it found me.

Dopamine Chamber makes me confident that a valuable lesson has been learned.

It’s an atmospherically bleak release that survives its fate as a misery to listen to, with a lot of clever deviations from the formula. This implies a formula be present, and it certainly is adhered to a little too strictly on the first half of the runtime. Still, if that means getting to incredible songs like ‘Tongue’, ‘Where Is Gone?’ and ‘Japan’ with an additional tier of in-context admiration, I’m all for it.

This is the kind of tricky project that only serves to make an excellent group even better as they continue to develop an understanding of what makes an idea work, what to accent and what to let breathe.

I want to see them ‘stage’ a record in myriad ways, really confront the idea that they (have to) sound like X or Y thing. If they stay as creative as this, I truly believe they will.