Photo: Ewen Spencer
Out today on XL Recordings
I often think warmly back to ye olde new millennium, when bands were releasing anxious records about the dystopia of a post-dotcom world: Radiohead’s Kid A, Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump and, a little later, Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero. How quaint it all seems now. Fast forward two decades and we’re reaching a new zenith for the apocalypse album. (Well, apocalypse everything really, but you can read the rest of the Nerve for that). Ham-brained scrolling, the end of empathy, tech overlord domination and impending global collapse all loom large in new releases these days – and who can blame the artists? The early days of the internet were a utopia compared to this. Comic Sans, we took thee for granted.
Fontaines DC are the next to soundtrack our sleepwalk into oblivion. The Irish five-piece have always dealt a decent hand in doom: in 2019 their post-punk debut Dogrel narrowed the lens on being down-and-out in Dublin but was fairly hopeful, with deeply lyrical streams of consciousness about evolving Irish identity that marked them out as ones to watch. Skinty Fia, the band’s moving-to-London record, began the gradual decline into gloom. Then 2024’s Romance expanded their sound (and wardrobe) into 90s grunge and shoegaze, with a sense of creeping desensitisation and foreboding, and songs about going “into the darkness again”.
The chamber of the album’s title is the record itself but also the fuggy claustrophobia of being trapped in our phones
Across those six or so years, Fontaines have led the charge to reinstall rock music at the top of awards lists in the UK, kickstarted a new wave of Irish guitar bands and become A-listers who make music for films (this year’s Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man) and walk red carpets. This summer, they completed the ultimate grebo rite of passage by headlining Reading festival. Despite being arena-massive, they’ve also keenly emphasised their political stance, expressing support for Palestine with striking visuals during those huge shows and projecting lines such as “Israel is committing genocide, use your voice”.
Now, on their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, the Fontaines are using their voice to express how far we are from humanity. The sonics take the lead on songs that are less poetic, more pointed and notably gothic (“I remember when they held me up against the summertime / And the tears would fall / Baby if you try / There’s no harm in saying /Leave it, let it die” is just one of the lines to spill from frontman Grian Chatten’s notebook). They luxuriate in mood over specific meaning. The chamber of the album’s title is the record itself but also the fuggy claustrophobia of being trapped in our phones, illustrated by the thick atmosphere that permeates each track.
To help build this hellscape, the band has again enlisted production mastermind James Ford, recently Mercury-nominated for his work on War Child’s Help(2) album and best known for his studio wizardry with the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Blur and Pulp. On Dopamine Chamber, he has deployed all manner of synthesisers in place of guitars and pared back the strings of Romance, while genius mix engineer Marta Salogni helps to balance the ooze of Fontaines’ subtly evolving sound. The muscular synth-noir chug of new songs Marianne and Mimesis – among the band’s most anthemic yet – is no coincidence: Ford and Salogni worked together on Depeche Mode’s 2023 album Memento Mori. The track Tongue is another impressive feat: a sinister and thrusting rock song that somehow finds the sonic harmony in a maelstrom of trip-hop beats, jaunty keys, tongue-twisting, quasi-rap vocals and an obliterating chorus.
Elsewhere, Japan feels like Mazzy Star covering Oasis and those twinkling alt-rock and sneering Britpop influences blend well across the rest of Dopamine Chamber, though Chatten has said he was inspired more specifically by the music of elusive Italian star Mina, darkwave and body horror films. While he has a tendency to inhabit the vocal style of whatever band the music is channelling, here his baritone sounds at its most confident, especially on the post-rock charge of Happy For You and Where Is Gone?. The latter, a duet with Spanish pop star Rosalía, the only guest featured on the album, is easily the strongest song, updating Lee Hazlewood’s and Nancy Sinatra’s sweeping outlaw/siren dynamic with the murder-ballady edge of mid-90s Nick Cave and Kylie.
Rather than being cynically storyboarded, though, Dopamine Chamber artfully employs these references to create a mutant new alternative sound for a band wading through the digital debris and trying to make sense of the overwhelm. It’s a supersized album that could happily fill arenas – which is just as well, because their next major tour kicks off next week in Portugal and heads to the UK on 20 November. Let’s just hope the world hasn’t imploded by then, eh?
Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.