Fontaines D.C. are back with a new album, and their fifth record is already carrying more weight than the band may have expected. On Tuesday, the Dublin five-piece announced Dopamine Chamber, out October 16 via XL Recordings, and shared its first single, “Marianne,” along with a new video directed by Dave Meyers.
Produced by James Ford, Dopamine Chamber follows 2024’s Romance, but the band is once again straying further away from the guitar-heavy sound that defined their earlier years. This time around, they are leaning further into synthesizers, samples, triggers, marching drums, and strings.
The result is an album that sounds like it is meant to reflect the world around it. Across Dopamine Chamber, Fontaines D.C. explore the relationship between pleasure and dread while touching on themes of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, political violence and a constant, distracting stream of memes, celebrity culture, and bad news that exists alongside it all, demonstrating that nothing exists in a vacuum.
“The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” frontman Grian Chatten says.
“You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.”
“Marianne” is the first glimpse inside that chamber and the track is dramatic and almost theatrical, drawing inspiration in part from the 2024 thriller series Ripley. Chatten sings about escapism and hedonism, offering the listener a way out as the song balances something beautiful with something much darker underneath, in a way that allows you to feel entirely immersed.
But “Marianne” almost wasn’t part of the album at all. In an Instagram post following the announcement, bassist Conor Deegan revealed that the song was one of roughly 40 tracks the band wrote while making Dopamine Chamber, but it was initially left off the record. That changed when the band played the songs for their late manager, Trev, at his home in Brighton. After hearing “Marianne,” Trev questioned why the band would leave it behind, calling them “absolute lunatics” for wanting to leave the song off the album. The band listened, brought it back, and now the song has become the first single from Dopamine Chamber.
Deegan went on to dedicate the album to Trev, writing about everything he gave the band and everything he taught them. He also noted that the album now feels more fitting to their lives than they expected when they were writing it: an escape in the midst of chaos while embodying the idea itself.
“Our albums have always questioned a sense of place,” Deegan said in the album announcement.
“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?”
For Chatten, that question is connected to a world that feels increasingly difficult to look away from. He described Romance as being roughly 60% human and 40% affected by automation and a loss of feeling, while Dopamine Chamber flips that balance. He said the new record feels “more like 60 per cent corrupted,” with the band choosing to reflect the ugliness around them rather than force a hopeful ending.
Fontaines D.C. will continue their European run this month, including appearances at Reading Festival, Leeds Festival and Electric Picnic. The band will return to the US in September for Shaky Knees in Atlanta, Sea.Hear.Now in Asbury Park and Ohana Festival in Dana Point.
Dopamine Chamber is out October 16 via XL Recordings. You can pre-order the album here.
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