{"id":651254,"date":"2026-10-11T06:02:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T06:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/651254\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T06:02:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T06:02:21","slug":"fontaines-dc-we-just-hang-out-with-ourselves-and-dont-really-interact-as-much-with-other-people-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/651254\/","title":{"rendered":"Fontaines DC: \u2018We just hang out with ourselves and don\u2019t really interact as much with other people\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fontaines DC have no issue declaring their insularity as a band. Their capacity to create, they say, is down to the fact that their main artistic connections are between one another, as well as to a work ethic they\u2019ve had ever since they formed in Dublin<\/a> more than a decade ago. <\/p>\n

But insularity doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re closed to the existential questions of our time. The scope of Dopamine Chamber, their new album, tells us so.<\/p>\n

Its predecessor, Romance<\/a>, won the Choice Music Prize and was nominated for the Mercury Prize and two Grammys. It brought an aesthetic shift and a demanding touring schedule. One might think Fontaines DC<\/a> were due a break. But that\u2019s not how they operate.<\/p>\n

The new album, their fifth in seven years, is arguably their finest. Previously bathed in the neon of Romance, the band return filtered through the cold blue tones of an LP that articulates the oppressive nature of our age \u2013 its anxieties, uncertainties and sense of tipping points \u2013 through smashing guitars, sweeping strings, wonderfully coloured synths and songs that speak to a band dropping a pin in a glitching map, with new territory loading in real time.<\/p>\n

Thematically, it touches on artificial-intelligence<\/a> scepticism, the residue of crumbling European grandeur, hedonism, climate anxiety<\/a> and despondency. The band\u2019s lead singer, Grian Chatten<\/a>, says Dopamine Chamber needed to be a \u201ccatastrophic warning\u201d. <\/p>\n

Impeccably sung and played, it is also, in its scale and ambition, made for enormous crowds. With production from James Ford and engineering led by Marta Salogni, Fontaines DC have made an album on which avant-garde textures sit happily alongside stadium-sized gestures.<\/p>\n

Conor Deegan III<\/a>, the band\u2019s bassist, and Tom Coll<\/a>, their drummer, are in New York when we talk. They\u2019re in the city to prepare for a US festival with some of the biggest rock bands around: The Strokes<\/a>, Turnstile, Geese<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fontaines DC are a rock band too, of course, but much will likely be made of the way this album, inky with synths, stretches the limits of such categorisation.<\/p>\n

\"FontainesFontaines DC. Photograph: Elizaveta Porodina <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s trying to mix a lot of different things together that seem like they don\u2019t make sense together on paper, or that they\u2019re conflicting,\u201d Deegan says. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut in actual fact, they really well describe what it feels like to be in this moment in time. You can doomscroll while sitting at the Parthenon. Do you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Romance, Deegan says, their development process was \u201cvery much of The Rolling Stones\u2019 world: if you can\u2019t play it with your hands and sing it with your voices all at once, you\u2019re not doing it\u201d. <\/p>\n

Fontaines now have a different approach. Having come off tour in the early autumn of 2025, the band spent a month apart. \u201cWhen you\u2019re so institutionalised with seeing each other every day, a month felt like a f**king year,\u201d Coll says. <\/p>\n

When they reconvened, they spent three months together in a studio in London, developing the album\u2019s sound and recording demos, Deegan says, like \u201ca group of mad scientists in the lab, with all the equipment and tools at our disposal, trying to find sounds\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone was really firing,\u201d Coll says. \u201cIt\u2019s always interesting trying to break new sonic palettes. Sometimes you want to go too far, and then rein it back a bit. I found that process amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As they set about \u201ctrying to figure out how we were all feeling about the world, about our environment\u201d, as Deegan puts it, they were also attempting to discover what \u201cthe spark for this new collection of work\u201d would be.<\/p>\n

It turned out to be Six Shot Morning, the album\u2019s opening track. Its pulsating machine heartbeat underpins a sense of teetering on a precipice. Two songs later, on Mimesis \u2013 potentially the best pop song the band have made \u2013 Chatten captures the album\u2019s duality, sunnily singing, \u201cWell, everybody\u2019s depressed \/ We\u2019re running on a wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of anxiety as well that we\u2019re experiencing and people are experiencing,\u201d Deegan says of the album\u2019s themes. \u201cA lack of hope. Disconnection. Everyone is looking for something to escape into and make themselves feel better.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work of the French sociologist Bruno Latour was a touchstone. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this great book. It\u2019s called O\u00f9 Suis-Je? \u2013 Where Am I?,\u201d Deegan says. \u201cOur friend Nikolaj Schultz was working underneath [Latour]. He has this great line in it: \u2018The moon is the only thing in nature I can look upon without guilt.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a very powerful and haunting line, and it\u2019s very true. We look at rivers, we look at trees, and we feel guilty for what we\u2019ve been doing to the natural world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moon is this kind of thing, a celestial body, we could look at and feel okay.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yet when the band were recording the album in the English countryside and looking at stars in a night sky free from the light pollution of London, \u201cwe were realising a lot of them were satellites\u201d. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Joy Division: Eternal review \u2013 A buttoned-down band unbowed, unravelled and gloriously unleashedOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was this reminder that we can\u2019t even look into the night sky and look at these celestial bodies any more without feeling some kind of guilt \u2013 how much we have disturbed even space.\u201d <\/p>\n

The closing lyrics of Mimesis come to mind: \u201cIf you\u2019re a star, show me \/ If you\u2019re not, let me be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cinnate claustrophobia to the modern world\u201d, as Deegan puts it \u2013 \u201cironically because of the amount of connection we have to everyone else, and the amount of information we have\u201d \u2013 is fundamental to the album. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis big window we have to the outer world in our pocket, everywhere we go, somehow makes everywhere much more claustrophobic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chatten travelled around Europe to write his lyrics, stopping in Vienna to visit the Sigmund Freud Museum, viewing work by Egon Schiele<\/a> and Gustav Klimt<\/a> at the Leopold Museum and reading Arthur Schnitzler<\/a>\u2019s Dream Story, the novella from which Stanley Kubrick<\/a> made his film Eyes Wide Shut. <\/p>\n

But Venice<\/a>, the band say, is the album\u2019s defining metaphor. Chatten wrote lyrics there before recording them in Palermo, in Sicily<\/a>. He was also obsessively listening to the mid-20th-century Italian singer Mina.<\/p>\n

A pair of remarkable songs anchor the album. The first, One Man, contains the album\u2019s title in a track bookended by the sounds of children playing football outside Palermo cathedral: \u201cDopamine chamber, just tryna kill the pain \/ you can\u2019t escape the feeling once you\u2019ve given it a name.\u201d <\/p>\n

The second, Where Is Gone?, is a sweeping ballad featuring the Spanish star Rosal\u00eda<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s my favourite song on the record,\u201d Deegan says. \u201cI think that\u2019s something really special Grian came up with. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was having this bit of a thing where he was uncontactable for a week, and we were just kind of hearing snippets from the friends he was with that he was in Europe.\u201d <\/p>\n

When a voice note arrived from Chatten about Where Is Gone?, Deegan thought it was \u201ccrazy good\u201d. <\/p>\n

The band is effusive about Rosal\u00eda. \u201cWe\u2019ve respected her music for years,\u201d Deegan says. Coll and Carlos O\u2019Connell<\/a>, the band\u2019s guitar and synth player, went to one of the Catalan singer\u2019s concerts last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a dance piece, a theatre piece, an orchestra pit in the middle. The visual work, the camerawork \u2013 amazing,\u201d Coll says. <\/p>\n

\"FontainesFontaines DC: Grian Chatten and Carlos O’Connell during the band’s performance at Leeds Festival in August. Photograph: Charlie Barclay Harris <\/p>\n

Where Is Gone? makes Deegan think of the Ingmar Bergman<\/a> film Wild Strawberries and of Proust\u2019s madeleine \u2013 \u201cor, if you want to be less pretentious about it, the ratatouille in Ratatouille\u201d.<\/p>\n

The song poses an existential question, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are spinning out so much now, we don\u2019t even know where we\u2019re going to end up, and not just where we\u2019re going to end up but what that\u2019s going to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fontaines DC have always been committed artists. \u201cWe started with a really high work ethic,\u201d Deegan says. \u201cWe really did spend five days a week in that rehearsal room when we were starting off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, as their profile grew, they took on twice as many summer bookings as before. \u201cThat set a standard of busyness,\u201d Deegan says. \u201cSo when we were releasing an album or two \u2013 recording two albums in a year, like we did with Dogrel<\/a> and Hero\u2019s Death<\/a> \u2013 we didn\u2019t notice. Also, we didn\u2019t know any different straight into the music industry.\u201d <\/p>\n

Since then, he says, their insularity has been their strength. \u201cWe\u2019ve just been ticking along, not watching what anyone else has been doing too much, not doing too much comparison, just doing our own thing. We have our goals of what we want to achieve, and we know what we have to do to do them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"FontainesFontaines DC: the band with Trevor Dietz, their late manager <\/p>\n

Later, Coll says, \u201cWe\u2019re really awkward to be in social settings as a band, so we just hang out with ourselves and don\u2019t really interact as much with other people. Trev always kept us on the ground, you know? So trying to continue in his spirit, for sure, is a very important thing.\u201d <\/p>\n

Trev is Trevor Dietz<\/a>, the band\u2019s manager and, they say, sixth member. His death<\/a>, in June, devastated the band. It remains too sad and sensitive a topic to broach.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Trevor Dietz and Fontaines DC emerged in a Dublin that seems to be slipping awayOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Dietz\u2019s early belief in the band set Fontaines DC on their remarkable trajectory. They paid tribute to him in their headline set on the final night of Electric Picnic<\/a>, in August, during which Chatten brought his fist up to the lens of one of the cameras relaying their performance to the arena\u2019s big screens: each of his knuckles was inked with a letter to spell out Trev.<\/p>\n

\"FontainesFontaines DC: Grian Chatten has Trevor Dietz’s name on his knuckles. Photograph: Charlie Barclay Harris <\/p>\n

As the set ended, the screens flashed the news that Fontaines will play Slane Castle<\/a> next year. Was Slane on a vision board at some stage? <\/p>\n

Coll laughs and shakes his head. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest, no. It\u2019s crazy. I\u2019ve actually never been to Slane … I think Curley\u201d \u2013 his bandmate Conor Curley<\/a> \u2013 \u201cwas at a Kings of Leon<\/a> show there. In fairness, this wasn\u2019t on the cards when we were starting at all. We were stupidly ambitious, but Slane is a different f**king thing. It\u2019s kind of just mad.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Fontaines DC to play two nights at Slane Castle in June 2027Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Next summer they will also be playing stadiums in Britain. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all just a bit overwhelming, but in a great way, you know?\u201d Coll says. <\/p>\n

At Electric Picnic this summer, he thought back to his first time at a music festival, watching Arctic Monkeys<\/a> play the same Sunday night slot, just before the English band released their fifth album, AM. Now he\u2019s in the same position.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just feel a bit blown away sometimes that the lads who met each other in Dublin in Bimm\u201d \u2013 the music college they went to \u2013 \u201cand were in that tiny rehearsal room for years, trying to tune their guitars, ended up rising to it all, and that there wasn\u2019t a moment where any of us went \u2018I can\u2019t do this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Deegan, part of Dopamine Chamber\u2019s creative process was exploring the kind of band they want to become. What is that band? <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really excites me still is the philosophy of The Velvet Underground<\/a>,\u201d he says, \u201cwhere they were simultaneously pushing boundaries of pop music but, also, it was still pop music.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"FontainesFontaines DC: Conor Curley at Leeds Festival in August. Photograph: Charlie Barclay Harris <\/p>\n

He characterises the blend of John Cale<\/a> and Lou Reed<\/a>\u2019s artistry as finding \u201csome really interesting Zen balance\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want us to be able to keep pushing the boundaries more and more, and be more experimental, but never compromise on the fact that it should be a functioning song \u2013 that it should be an enjoyable song \u2013 even if we do crazy things within it.\u201d<\/p>\n

More and more, he believes, Fontaines are capable of being increasingly innovative, making songs that have evolved significantly since those on their debut album \u201cbut still feel like Fontaines. We could end up doing things that are very, very diverse and it still feels like us. That\u2019s such an amazing place to be in as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dopamine Chamber is released via XL Recordings on Friday, October 16th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fontaines DC have no issue declaring their insularity as a band. Their capacity to create, they say, is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26041,276108,218,276105,2885,276106,276104,276107,12421,93,3408,153496,20083,61,276109,60,26014,195455,83588,170757,13081,111088,244036,273149,211052,35168,42415],"class_list":["post-651254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-arctic-monkeys","tag-arthur-schnitzler","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-carlos-o-connell","tag-climate-change","tag-conor-curley","tag-conor-deegan-iii","tag-egon-schiele","tag-electric-picnic","tag-entertainment","tag-fontaines-dc","tag-grian-chatten","tag-gustav-klimt","tag-ie","tag-ingmar-bergman","tag-ireland","tag-john-cale","tag-lou-reed","tag-rosalia","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-slane-castle","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-the-velvet-underground","tag-tom-coll","tag-trevor-dietz","tag-venice","tag-your-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}