Dopamine Chamber XL Recordings
Two years on from Romance, Fontaines D.C. return with Dopamine Chamber, their fifth studio album and second for XL Recordings. Produced, like its acclaimed predecessor, by James Ford and conceived between England and Sicily, the record sends the Dublin band sailing into unexpectedly unfamiliar waters, often far beyond their familiar Anglo-Saxon domains. The opening track, Six Shot Morning — a kind of Ulyssean awakening — is enough to signal a new atmosphere: the guitars’ fire is dialled back, while Chatten’s voice is enveloped in a milky veil of synthesizers, sequences and mechanical beats. It is from the pale, poisonous light of this morning — one in which we all seem to be immersed — that the Irish band’s boldest, most dreamlike and vital adventure yet, both formally and psychologically, begins.
The single Marianne (faintly recalling the Depeche Mode of Songs of Faith and Devotion, refracted through the band’s favourite Leonard Cohen) followed by Mimesis, which brushes against and reignites post-punk at its finest and truest, in the spirit of Wire, the Cure-esque Happy for You, (an almost instant classic), Demolition and Tongue, they follow one another with a relentless urgency, driven by insistent rhythms, nervous tension and sudden eruptions of pent-up rage. The dopamine invoked in the title is not simply synonymous with pleasure, but with anticipation and the pursuit of ever more sophisticated forms of gratification. The album itself seems to work along those lines: the listening experience builds through accumulation, wandering onwards as though the reward were always waiting one song further ahead.
Yet Dopamine Chamber does more than chase the next rush. From One Man onwards, something begins to loosen. The rough edges soften, the melodies stretch out, the songs grow calmer, at times even optimistic, as though, after being subjected to a frantic succession of stimuli, the listener could finally surrender to pleasure itself. The moving yet vertiginous duet with Rosalía (a latter-day Hope Sandoval) on the Scott Walker-esque Where Is Gone? opens up a fissure of shimmering elegy. You Miss Me, the album’s most overt nod to the melodic sensibility of 1960s Italian pop, and Japan seem to inhabit a brighter, more baroque, almost Mediterranean realm, where the music no longer needs to propel us towards the next track, but can finally linger over its own images. This is not simply a drop in intensity, but a shift from the pursuit of gratification to gratification itself, from anticipation to the possibility of staying, however briefly, within what one has found.
Then, just as the album seems to have reached a state of stillness, a moment of reconciliation (whether natural, induced or artificial hardly matters), Intimate reopens the cycle of tension, alternating more frenetic passages with others that are markedly more relaxed and melodic. Excitement, release, excitement once again.
By the band’s own admission, the question “Where do you escape to?” runs through Dopamine Chamber without ever finding a definitive answer. In a present where artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence occupy the same field of attention as memes, jokes and celebrity culture, the album offers no escape route. Instead, it reproduces the mechanism itself. It traces a wave, an emotional curve in which pleasure is never a stable destination, but an impulse that constantly renews itself. The Dopamine Chamber is therefore both refuge and trap: a room we enter to escape the noise of the world, only to find ourselves longing to return the moment we leave. Francesco Amoroso e Francesco Giordani
