Fontaines D.C. – Dopamine Chamber review: the first album Fontaines that doesn’t feel Irish

The Dublin band’s fifth album scales up without selling out, but the price of universality is the Irish distinctiveness that once set them apart.

The usual story goes like this: a band gets big, the songs get safer, and the edges get filed down for the people at the back of the field. Fontaines D.C. are now big enough to play Slane Castle twice next summer, and sell out arenas in Europe and North America. Yet Dopamine Chamber isn’t aimed at maintaining or bringing in any casual new fans, a laudable way to approach the biggest album of the Fontaines’ career to date.

This is a record that sounds comfortable with the band’s new stature, and doesn’t play up to their new status as one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Nothing here feels specifically written with a stadium crowd in mind.

That resolve is all the more striking given the circumstances. This is their fifth album in a little over seven years, a work rate few of their peers can match. It arrives months after the tragic death of their manager and champion Trevor Dietz in June. The band have kept going and the album’s rollout never broke stride when others might have taken a pause (these guys never seem to take a break but it hasn’t affected them yet).

Picking up where Romance left off

Musically, Dopamine Chamber picks up where Romance left off. That album opened a new era, folding the lessons of three quick-fire records into something more refined and expansive.

The approach here is similar: four decades of rock as raw material, with electronics, trip-hop rhythms and cinematic string-assisted atmospheres now pushed to the front. Romance also arrived with a visual reinvention, the band cosplaying as a nu-metal band in their first XL press shots. That look was shed soon after ‘Starburster’ and the release of the album, and we are, thankfully, back to the band being themselves for Dopamine Chamber.

Dopamine Chamber’s sound is more tightly defined than Romance. James Ford, back as producer, keeps the album within a clear sonic palette. There’s no time for a detour like Skinty Fia’s ‘The Couple Across The Way’, no folk interlude to break the spell but the band play well within the well-defined form.

The first Fontaines D.C. album that doesn’t feel Irish

Something else is missing, too. For the first time on record, the Whipping Boy lineage that has run through every Fontaines album can’t be heard. It’s one sign of a broader shift.

Dopamine Chamber is the first Fontaines D.C. album that doesn’t feel like the work of an Irish band. Where Dublin once shaped everything from the accents to the subject matter, here Irish culture and experience barely registers.

They’ve long since relocated to the UK as their base so does this mean Fontaines aren’t an Irish Neoliberal PSYOP after all? Tellingly, the reviews so far have hardly mentioned their hometown or Ireland, and a couple have even called them a British band (restart the clock).

Bassist Conor Deegan frames their records as a running inquiry into place: Dublin, then life away from it, then the search for romance elsewhere. This time, he says, the question was where you escape to. The answer is nowhere on a map, but into screens, hedonism and fantasy.

“Our albums have always questioned a sense of place. First Dublin, then being away from Dublin, and then trying to find the romance elsewhere. On this record, the question became: where do you escape to?”

Conor Deegan

The lyrics follow suit. Grian Chatten has described the record as more “corrupted” than its predecessor, and his writing has traded its trademark colloquialisms and poetry for something broader and more globally relatable: less tied to place but harder to hold close.

Trip-hop drums and Peter Hook basslines

On ‘Tongue’, Chatten’s voice stretches into something close to rapping, which is new ground for him as a vocalist and it’s matched with Tom Coll’s drumming shifting into trip-hop territory before the song reaches a Portishead-style crescendo (Coll’s drums are a big highlight of this record). Lyrically the glib chorus of “more abuse than an Adderall / shit, I’m sorry, didn’t realise I called,” doesn’t quite match the song’s fresh heightened production.

‘Mimesis’ is built on a bassline direct from the Peter Hook / New Order school, and might be the best single pop song on this record, and speaking of, lead single ‘Marianne’ sets the tone early and works better among its tracklist than standalone.

Partly inspired by the 2024 Ripley series starring Andrew Scott, it sets regal, Lana Del Rey-leaning strings against ’80s synths with a Badalamenti chill. Crisp drums and a driving bassline anchor it as Ford lets the whole thing drift into a swirling reverie.

Again though, there’s a sense of Chatten saying not much to hold onto from his own life perspective to give the song meaning (“You should come and stay here / You can follow my lead / I can help you disappear / cinematic feeling / understand this is your life / You can go on dreaming / You can go under the knife”).

In between, the songs have a spindly atmospheric rock feel, the slow melodies of ‘Happy For You’ and the string-stirred ‘One Man’ offer breathing room, the latter unfortunately with the dull refrain of “I’m only one man.”

The grungy ‘Demolition’ is the closest Chatten has come to sounding like Liam Gallagher – he even sings the words “live forever” during it.

Enter Rosalía

Then there’s ‘Where Is Gone?’, which marks the first time Fontaines have brought a guest onto a studio album, and the choice speaks to their ambition: Rosalía, one of the defining voices in modern music. It’s a sweeping, windswept duet in a grand tradition, closer to Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’ or Nick Cave and PJ Harvey’s ‘Henry Lee’ than anything in the band’s past with Rosalía playing it in a lower-register than the high-wire operatic blast of Lux. It’s a fresh thrill for the band’s discography to bring in that voice.

Of the album’s closing numbers, the orchestral-assisted alt-rock of ‘You Miss Me’ and gorgeous acoustic-rock vista of ‘Japan’ sound like they could fit onto Romance with ease, while the closer ‘Intimate’ leads with neon-dripped synth colour and is a bit of a mirror of opening track ‘Six Shot Morning’, with Deego and Chatten singing “dying, dying, dying, I’m dead” as the atmospheric haze descends.

Cohesion over big moments

What Dopamine Chamber lacks is a single towering moment. Romance had the event of ‘Starburster’, the all-time love song ‘Favourite’ and the blast jolt of ‘Here’s The Thing’. Nothing here reaches those singular peaks.

The trade-off is cohesion. Songs that felt slight as singles make far more sense in sequence. The album works best as a whole, a lush and cinematic modern rock record. It’s a liminal exhibition space that is trying to make sense of how to interact in the modern world.

It’s worth repeating, the band have not compromised on this set of songs for a greater audience, that is happening anyway, a testament to their hard work and growing reputation. I would love to hear them get even weirder, or make a politically-charged record as clear-eyed as their on-stage social justice solidarity.

That’s the friction at the heart of Dopamine Chamber. Like U2 before them, Fontaines D.C. have gained a world-sized sound and an uncompromising sense of purpose, and given up some of the specificity that made them feel like ours but without sanding off the edges that keep them interesting.

Let’s hope they don’t lose the courage of their political convictions too.