![\"Fontaines](\"https:\/\/www.nme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/fontaines_dopamine_Ewen_Spencer_1.jpg\")
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\u201cTo be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all over your face,\u201d Fontaines D.C.<\/a> frontman Grian Chatten told NME<\/em><\/a> in his typically vivid and poetically unsettling manner on the eve of their last album \u2018Romance\u2019<\/a>. \u201cEvery now and again you have to fucking shake them off, just to see who you are again.\u201d<\/p>\n After the neon shock and anti-nostalgia sentiment of the genre-defying \u2018Romance\u2019, there were certainly no flies on Dublin\u2019s finest. But then what? A winning formula that turned one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years into a stadium-filling<\/a> festival headliner<\/a> would be one for most to stick to, but comfort is rigor mortis for Fontaines. Add to that, the rot of the world itself.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cfaded grandeur\u201d in Venice, Vienna and Sicily to emerge with a sense of \u201ccatastrophic warning\u201d for album five. That quest for escape from the claustrophobia bursts out of the mechanical Depeche Mode<\/a> death march of opener \u2018Six Shot Morning\u2019, a synthy tour through this waking doom-scroll nightmare for \u201cmelancholy hearts in a motion film\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n 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 \u2018Marianne\u2019 swoons into a \u201ccinematic feeling<\/em>\u201d to \u201chelp you disappear<\/em>\u201d before the \u201880s synth-pop<\/a> noir of \u2018Mimesis\u2019 sees obsession and unrequited love meet \u201cindifference<\/em>\u201d in this age where \u201ceverybody\u2019s depressed, we\u2019re running on a wheel<\/em>\u201d, and then \u2018Happy For You\u2019 is rock<\/a>-drenched exorcism of acceptance and letting go.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018Dopamine Chamber\u2019 explores. Far from the scrappy guitar punk<\/a> of debut \u2018Dogrel\u2019<\/a>, Fontaines have left it all on the field with an opulent and textured musical tapestry befitting some of Chatten\u2019s most absorbing poetry. This is best showcased by the dizzying trip-hop gloom with a groove of \u2018Tongue\u2019 swooning into a swampy Bad Seeds<\/a>-esque breakdown before a full-on cyber-punk attack, the skittering sci-fi hymn of \u2018Intimate\u2019, and the fuzzy-electronica<\/a>-tinged album highlight \u2018Demolition\u2019 complete with the frontman spitting like a twisted Liam Gallager<\/a>, inviting you to \u201ccosy up to my horror show for the callous-hearted, the pre-departed<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n The record does err back towards the human side. We have \u2018You Miss Me\u2019 coming from the Robert Smith<\/a> playbook of a shadowy spiderweb verse before a flower in bloom chorus, and \u2018Japan\u2019 is bittersweet acoustic singalong that floats above the ground and asks \u201cwhy\u2019d you have to go and make it real?<\/em>\u201d as Chatten looks upon a one-sided relationship. The breathy and elegiac sun-riser \u2018One Man\u2019 gives the album its title and captures its core mission: \u201cdopamine chamber, just trying to kill the pain, you can\u2019t escape the feeling once you\u2019ve given it a name.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n If you were expecting a pop banger via the Rosal\u00eda<\/a> collab \u2018Where Is Gone?\u2019, think again \u2013 it\u2019s a lovelorn Morricone<\/a> meets Bond theme ballad that peacefully realises that sometimes \u201cthere\u2019s no harm in saying leave it, let it die<\/em>\u201d. Even \u2018Romance\u2019 had the daydream euphoria of \u2018Favourite\u2019, but there\u2019s no real light on here despite its Trojan Horse hooks. The album is all the richer for not having a Radio X<\/em> banger shoehorned in. It just goes to show that you can fill out a stadium without shitting out a \u2018Sex On Fire\u2019. The gothy tones of The Cure<\/a> linger and \u2018Dopamine Chamber\u2019 would sit comfortably alongside the melancholy moodpieces of \u2018Disintegration\u2019 and \u2018Pornography\u2019, as well as the future-proof genre-clash and dislocation of Massive Attack<\/a>\u2019s \u2018Mezzanine\u2019.<\/p>\n The biggest Irish band since U2<\/a> have now also secured themselves as the definitive band of this decade on \u2018Dopamine Chamber\u2019 \u2013 an extraordinary record for extraordinary times. Amidst all the hiss and the decay, Fontaines have made something pure, honest and feeling while in exhilarating motion. Now you see who they are.<\/p>\n The post Fontaines D.C. \u2013 \u2018Dopamine Chamber\u2019 review: a doom-ridden escape from the band of the decade<\/a> appeared first on NME<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cTo be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all over your face,\u201d Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten told NME in his typically vivid and poetically unsettling manner on the eve of their last album \u2018Romance\u2019. \u201cEvery now and again you have to fucking shake them off, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-travel"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 11:19:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![\"Fontaines](\"https:\/\/www.nme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/fontaines_dopamine_Ewen_Spencer_2.jpg\")
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![\"fontaines](\"https:\/\/www.nme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fontaines_Dopamine_Chamber_2000.jpg\")
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