With its pulsing bass and Lynchian music video, “Marianne”—the lead single from Fontaines D.C.’s fifth album, Dopamine Chamber—offers both a thrilling sign of things to come and compelling proof of just how much they have evolved from the gritty guitars and half-spoken-word vocals of their 2019 debut, Dogrel.
Of course, not everything has changed. The members of Fontaines D.C.—namely, lead vocalist Grian Chatten, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, bassist Conor “Deego” Deegan III, and drummer Tom Coll—have always been a cerebral bunch, as uncompromising in their creative vision as their politics, even as their audience has ballooned. When I meet with Chatten and O’Connell at their Brooklyn hotel in mid-September, their humility is still intact too. The success of their last album, the Grammy-nominated Romance (2024), cemented the Irish band’s shift from breakthrough act to global headliner.
“I think without the risk of taking a step in a certain direction, there is no impetus for me to write at all,” Chatten tells me. “If I did, it would be like a spiritual and creative death. I have no interest in that.” This isn’t to say that each record demands a total reinvention of their sound; the band’s body of work, we agree, functions more like a five-chord progression.
“I wanted to follow Romance to its end, literally and metaphorically,” Chatten continues. “I like the idea of beginning in a tight recording space, sounding like a live punk band, and then morphing into something more universal, sicker, festered, or something less human.” Before Dopamine Chamber came together, Chatten and O’Connell turned what should have been a break at the end of 2025 into a full-time writing brainstorm, sometimes with other artists in mind. Then, in the new year, the quintet went into the studio in Suffolk, England, with famed producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Blur).
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The direction this time was based, well, in intentionality. “Every sound, and the interaction of the arrangements, was planned out,” O’Connell explains. “That slower pace led to more listening and attention to detail, rather than getting out an intense performance and letting that intensity do the work.” Consider the opening track, the gloomy soundscape “Six Shot Morning”; Chatten’s evocative baritone riffs on Silicon Valley, while O’Connell, Curley, and Deego trade their guitars and bass for spectral synths. Or “One Man,” for which vocals were recorded in a makeshift sound booth assembled from a mattress and some cushions in Chatten’s Palermo Airbnb. (The song fades out to children playing outside the nearby cathedral.)
The cover of Dopamine Chamber, with photography by Elizaveta Porodina.
The idea, to hear Chatten tell it, was to shake their listeners awake with a catastrophic warning. “There was a lot of bad news around the time the album was written—from the Epstein files to other stories that render a sense of hopelessness in our sense of democracy,” he says. “You really feel your own insignificance or ineffectiveness. I wanted the album to feel like the end of the world a little bit—not necessarily a single human, but human life overall having its life flash before its eyes.” Chatten, the band’s main lyricist, was also inspired by his friend Nikolaj Schultz’s book Land Sickness, a semifictional tale of eco-anxiety. Dopamine Chamber sits at the intersection of peril and the pursuit of pleasure through distraction.
“Where Is Gone,” a forlorn orchestral ballad, represents the first time the band has featured another artist on their record—that artist being Rosalía. “I knew whatever she contributed would be amazing, but I didn’t foresee that there would be a kind of synergy that would make the song so much better, with the extra dynamic of the conversation between the two voices,” Chatten says, reverently referring to the song as “a gift.” The album wraps up with “Intimate,” a song the frontman wrote on the spot at a chaotic bar in Italy. “It was carnage—that sense where everyone’s aggressively pursuing something,” he says. “It just stirred up the feelings about a party at the end of the world, and that’s what I wanted ‘Intimate’ to sound like.”
A week later, at Flatbush’s historic Kings Theatre, Fontaines D.C. play their first New York gig in over a year. After 9 p.m., Luke Kelly’s “For What Died the Sons of Róisín” echoes through the venue, and the band members—variously wearing sunglasses or sipping wine—take the stage. Their set weaves together fan favorites and as-yet-unreleased songs from the new album. (“It’s nice playing songs that no one’s heard,” O’Connell told me earlier. “It reminds me of when we started, and it’s quite exciting.”) The solemnity of “Happy for You” from Dopamine Chamber quickly gives way to the heavy riffs of “Big Shot” from 2022’s Skinty Fia. Later on, for the grand finale, the band’s take on “In Heaven,” from the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, ushers in the chart-topping “Starburster” from Romance. Chatten raises his arms like a conductor as the room’s three thousand other voices sing the chorus back at him. (These stateside shows are downright cozy compared to the arenas the band packs in Europe; next summer, they will play to many tens of thousands of fans on back-to-back sold-out nights at Ireland’s Slane Castle.)
The striking scene reminds me of a remark O’Connell had made at the hotel. “I think the most important thing in music is for it to be moving,” he said. “I’m moved by the music that we’ve made, and I’m really proud of it.”
