When Fontaines D.C. take to the stage to close out Electric Picnic this Sunday night it will be another point of arrival for a band who have had an almost textbook ascent to global success.
As well as being their biggest ever Irish headliner, their return to Stradbally is also their first Irish show in over a year and it comes at a time of flux and change for the artful Irish five piece.
In October they release their fifth album Dopamine Chamber and they are still processing the shock death last June of their longtime manager Trevor Dietz, their “sixth member” and the man who discovered them back in 2017 and helped propel them to their current success.
Boys in a better band: Fontaines D.C. pictured in 2020
Having released four very good albums of increasing ambition to increasing commercial and critical success, Fontaines D.C. now have a generational pull that has established them as one of the biggest and most talked about rock bands in a world severely lacking in popular rock bands.
Dopamine Chamber is likely to take them to even further heights and open up a whole new set of challenges for an act who have always strived to remain true to their original vision.
Named after Johnny Fontaine, the burnt-out lounge lizard singer portrayed by Al Martino in The Godfather, they have had a truly meteoric rise.
From small, punky beginnings at BIMM (the British and Irish Modern Music Institute) in Dublin’s historic Liberties in 2014, front man Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums), who hail from Dublin, Mayo, Monaghan and Spain, have outstripped their wildest dreams.
Along the way, they have been audaciously prolific without loosening their grip on quality control.
In short order, Fontaines D.C. have taken stylistic leaps – from their celebrated 2019 debut album Dogrel, a gloriously slapdash salvo of post-punk swagger, to the poetic desolation of A Hero’s Death in 2020, Skinty Fia’s otherworldly strangeness in 2022, and 2024’s Romance, the record that really established them as a global act.
With their full-on engagement with the ruinous impact of technology and the parasitical creep of AI, are Fontaines D.C. set to sound track our brave new world of doom scrolling and catastrophising?
They have scored No.1s in Ireland and the UK, been nominated for a Grammy and won a Brit Award and become rock’s new princes. They are almost too good to be true.
And even in a business built on hype, Dopamine Chamber is indeed eagerly awaited, with new songs Marianne and Six Shot Morning suggesting that Fontaines D.C. are fully embracing the gothic grandeur they began to explore on Romance.
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According to a press release issued last week, the new album features “synthesiser, marching drums, samples and triggers, several songs with no guitars, and the strings of 1960s Italian pop”.
It is “the sound of a band moving decisively away from the guitar language of their early records into something colder, stranger and more synthetic”, the statement added.
Dopamine Chamber deals with themes of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence “all riding the same algorithms as memes, jokes and celebrity culture”.
Grian Chatten
“The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” says Chatten. “You step inside and we test these different mind or mood-altering pieces of music on you.”
“There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity,” he added.
With their full-on engagement with the ruinous impact of technology and the parasitical creep of AI, are Fontaines D.C. set to sound track our brave new world of doom scrolling and catastrophising?
Now signed to XL Recordings, the label that gave you Adele and Radiohead, they can be a challenging listen and their last few albums have taken on a haunting sense of longing, desire, and desperation.
However, their pop instincts have also come to the fore in more recent years, with the likes of Starburster, Favourite and I Love You bristling with hooks and choruses, compared to their more arcane and inscrutable moments.
31-year-old Chatten, who was born in Barrow-in-Furnace in Northern England before moving to the seaside North Dublin town of Skerries when he was a month old, is more likely to quote Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce than Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain. He is clearly in the lineage of rock’s poets, such as Nick Cave and Lou Reed.
The band’s success has also spawned a wave of new Irish acts such as Sprints and Gurriers who don’t need anyone’s permission and who are now at the vanguard in what is arguably the most vibrant Irish music scene of all time.
In a recent interview on BBC 6 Music, Charlie McCarthy of Gurriers said, “When I started in BIMM in 2017, Fontaines were just finishing. It was the start of a whole wave that I had no idea what was coming.
“It was a really cool time to be in that college because it was all kicking off. I remember finishing my first year and Dogrel had just come out and coming back for second year, at the top of the stairs from the college reception area there was this photo of Grian staring down the staircase.
“I thought – right, things have changed.” As someone once said, utterly.
Fontaines have also just announced a huge UK and European tour in support of Dopamine Chamber, promising Irish fans that pre-Christmas shows in Ireland are on the way.
Of course, a backlash is simmering, albeit from online commentators who – like the rest of us – have only heard those two new songs but have decreed that Chatten’s wounded Dublin street poet schtick is wearing thin and the band’s music has descended into formulaic self-parody.
However, anyone who sees them this Sunday in a probably water-logged field in Co Laois will be witnessing a band at the height of their powers with a lot left to say and do.
They told you they were gonna be big.