Fontaines D.C. return with new single ‘Marianne’ and announce album ‘Dopamine Chamber.’
Most musical acts dance precariously on the tightrope between stardom and cult hero’s, yet in this dialectic of recognition, for Fontaines D.C., it appears to have been natural, rarely does it feel that they have abandoned those whom they owe their success to in order to move into the mainstream – it’s simply the natural consequence of a group who proceed with care and are constantly in contact with the faculty of representation in art. How does making something sound a certain way affect the content of the message? Or, in other words, if we do this to our sound, in what ways will it change the emotional attachment to the music? So far, we’ve had the answers with the music. Now, with the announcement of a fifth album, ‘Dopamine Chamber’, and the offering its first single, ‘Marianne’, we are given a clue, a fraction, a sliver of what is to come – how they will do it this time.
At first, there could be questions of how does this record change from ‘Romance’. For a group that has consistently pushed their own boundaries, making each record different from the last, there was a hesitation, could this song have been on their last album? If so, what does it mean for the rest of the album. However, Fontaines have never showed anything to the contrary that they will be providing something new, so for now due to their reputation and past, one must be a believer. For the band themselves, where ‘Romance’ “was maybe 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling”, ‘Dopamine Chamber’ inverts those percentages. Within our algorithmic echo chambers, we witness death and destruction, climate collapse and political violence alongside AI slop and meaningless memes – yet regardless of the content it all pumps dopamine into our beings, pushing us to exhaustion whilst simultaneously our nervous systems operate in a frenzied storm. I, for one, am deeply interested in the narrative of the record and have enjoyed playing with questions of who and what is ‘Marianne’, how will it fit into the story we will be allowed to enter. A story we are told that centres on the question: “How willingly might a person surrender their imagination, when the alternative is to remain fully conscious of catastrophe?”
Few, if any groups, have captured the collective imaginary of our contemporary moment as successfully as Fontaines D.C. A near unanimous agreement of their proficiency and sonic excellence occurs at the near mention of their name. Four studio albums down, each resonating with their current support, each album converting more and more to their cause. Only intensifying the wait for their next musical offering, as more and more baited breaths wait to be resuscitated, to find nutrition and sustenance in the near yearly communion that is a Fontaines D.C. record. We wonder where we find reason, question the existentiality of existence, unmoored from purpose and adrift in the swells of modern life – perhaps why we love Fontaines D.C. so much is that they provide not answers but a consistent poetic inquiry into these same questions. For all their fame, their success and acclaim, as not just artists acting but people persisting, they struggle with these same tensions.
Fontaines’ music has always been an invitation. An invitation into cultural figures and political questions, considerations on nationality and internationalism – from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, to the subjectivity enmeshed within the Irish diaspora and their relation to Britain and Empire, to the histories of Irish-Palestinian solidarity. All these important invitations sound-tracked by their magnetic and alluring sound.
One must imagine this record will lead to a tour, larger in scale than anything they have done before. Given they sold out Finsbury last summer, and have enjoyed some massive festival slots this summer, stadiums are highly possible. What does it do to the music knowing it has to fill a stadium? That tens of thousands of fans will need to resonate with it, hear it and feel it. Within that question we may have some morsel of a suggestion of what is to come with the record, and that it is a fascinating one to ask.
Dopamine Chambers is out on the 16th October via XL Recordings. Yet, in the UK you may catch a glimpse of some of their new music at Reading and Leeds Festivals.
Photo by Elizaveta Porodina.
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