WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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Fontaines D.C.’s fifth studio album is a beautifully depressing spotlight on the everyday gloom and the magic of synth pop
Photo by @ewenspencer
“Dopamine chamber just tryna kill the pain; you can’t escape the feeling once you’ve given it a name.”
There’s a scene in Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’ 2022 quasi-autobiographical debut feature film, where Paul Mescal is drowning in the sweaty despair of a disco dance floor as David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure” plays. It is, to me, one of the most haunting images that the cinematic medium has provided the 2020s.
Dopamine Chamber is Fontaines D.C.’s entry into that canon.
A band that has reinvented itself again and again the more they’ve grown in acclaim, no small feat in and of itself, has done it again, casting its Ireland-sized shadow over new territory. From the post-punk underdog roots of Dogrel to Skinty Fia’s goth rock fogginess and Romance’s pop rock that sent the band into orbit (A Hero’s Death was not forgotten, but it exists as a bridge between Dogrel and Skinty Fia, which is in no way a criticism, just the reason not to list it), Dopamine Chamber is a masterful balancing act of end-of-world anguish with the stadium rock accessibility that matches the group’s superstardom.
It seems to be no coincidence that this is the album that the band—frontman Grian Chatten, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, bassist Carlos “Deego” Deegan III, and drummer Tom Coll—picked for this moment in time. They are superstars and one can imagine that existence is a dopamine chamber of its own. To be a rockstar - the idea is as much a part of culture as the existence actually is, one of the few states of being where the wall of boundaries is stripped of nearly all its opacity.
With that, as they’ve never been afraid to do, the band turns the mirror on the world and all of its catastrophes: the vampiric billionaires, the global conflicts, the apocalypse that constantly feels around the corner. Look everyone, they proclaim, you’re stuck in this mess as well. We’ve been conditioned to take actions, whether one or 100 degrees of separation away, that are a branch on the tree of gratification.
That doesn’t mean the end of the world has to be dreary and doomridden to our ears. In fact, this record is the band’s grooviest, with the synths of new wave shaking the hand of Chatten’s lyrical prowess, a deal to make his devilish calls to the listener pleasant sounding. “Mimesis” in particular makes getting capsized seem alluring. It pulls on the forbidden fruit, which, depending on your mileage with religious stories, could be seen as the first recorded instance of the corruption of a dopamine hit.
“Well, everybody’s depressed, we’re running on a wheel; I’m here to fight your corner, my heart is open,” Chatten hisses like the snake that lured Adam and Eve to curse humanity.
Pinpointing Chatten’s role throughout the record is important. He’s almost our guide to the underworld. On “One Man,” he nearly literalizes that. At every opportunity he lends a helping hand to destruction, into the chamber’s beating heart.
“Do you have a genuine need to be desired?; call me up any time that you want to fly, yeah.”
Eventually, the band lands on one of the most interesting conclusions possible - that even the most pure and intangible currency we have, love, can be commodified into a quick hit. This idea is given a test run on “Japan.” It’s one of the more beautiful tracks on the album but breaks your heart with its subject matter.
The song tackles what happens when a transactional relationship becomes real in a world unsuited for that kind of nakedness. We have torn love apart into dollar bills and individualism. It sounds gorgeous when you’re listening to it. And it’s on you to reckon with that.
“Sky’s gone crying on a beautiful world” as the opening track “Six Shot Morning” asserts, and we’re all dancing in the flood.
Fontaines D.C.’s superpower has always been creating wonderfully alluring sonic sandboxes to play in, walls of noise you could spend eternity in. Dopamine Chamber is the most meta of all their projects, a dark hellscape that pulls you in with a veneer of blissfulness, itself a culprit of the quick access happiness it ralliesagainst. Soon, it’ll be the cause for occasions of fans experiencing the contradictions live, screaming out lyrics of doom while being inundated with the grandeur of intoxicating sound.
