Fontaines D.C. – ‘Dopamine Chamber’ review: a doom-ridden escape from the band of the decade

“To be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all over your face,” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten told NME in his typically vivid and poetically unsettling manner on the eve of their last album ‘Romance’ .

“Every now and again you have to fucking shake them off, just to see who you are again.” READ MORE: At home with Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten: “Our personality is bigger than the sound that we make” After the neon shock and anti-nostalgia sentiment of the genre-defying ‘Romance’, there were certainly no flies on Dublin’s finest.

But then what? A winning formula that turned one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years into a stadium-filling festival headliner would be one for most to stick to, but comfort is rigor mortis for Fontaines.

Add to that, the rot of the world itself.

These are bleak times: societal and environmental collapse, the digital world fracturing from reality, horror fatigue, the works.

Coming up for air and searching for his muse, Chatten travelled to destinations of “faded grandeur” in Venice, Vienna and Sicily to emerge with a sense of “catastrophic warning” for album five.

That quest for escape from the claustrophobia bursts out of the mechanical Depeche Mode death march of opener ‘Six Shot Morning’, a synthy tour through this waking doom-scroll nightmare for “ melancholy hearts in a motion film”.

Fontaines D.C., 2026.

Credit: Dopamine Chamber As a mirror to the dopamine hit we get from our devices, the album moves from one intense mind-altering state to another while working as a whole macabre journey.

As part of the suite, the cyborg meets symphony balladry of ‘Marianne’ swoons into a “ cinematic feeling ” to “ help you disappear ” before the ‘80s synth- pop noir of ‘Mimesis’ sees obsession and unrequited love meet “ indifference ” in this age where “ everybody’s depressed, we’re running on a wheel ”, and then ‘Happy For You’ is rock -drenched exorcism of acceptance and letting go.

The band say they swung the pendulum from the more human elements of their sound to more harsh and synthetic extremities to bathe in the corruption that ‘Dopamine Chamber’ explores.

Far from the scrappy guitar punk of debut ‘Dogrel’ , Fontaines have left it all on the field with an opulent and textured musical tapestry befitting some of Chatten’s most absorbing poetry.