\n\t\then Fontaines D.C.<\/a> first came out of Dublin with their 2019 debut, Dogrel, they were a fun new twist on old-school post-punk. The spelunking bass lines recalled Joy Division and New Order, the jagged guitars evoked the Fall. But these guys had their own uniquely Irish sense of lyricism, absurdist humor, and underdog spirit. You\u2019d have to be a real spoil sport not to fall for a band whose frontman, Grian Chatten, told Rolling Stone U.K<\/a>. that he likes to relax before shows by listening to the audiobook of James Joyce\u2019s Dubliners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tEach subsequent Fontaines record has been different and more ambitious, and they really hit a peak with their 2024 LP, Romance<\/a>, expanding their sound into heavy Nineties alt-rock and industrial, Britpop, and a dream-rock canon from Cocteau Twins to Deftones to Lana Del Rey, while delivering sweeping, hard-hitting reflections on how to stay sane and maybe even hopeful in these increasingly dark times.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTheir fifth album, Dopamine Chamber<\/a>, has a similar world-building spirit. The band is reaching further beyond its guitar-rock foundations, pushing deeper into electronic moodiness and orchestral sweep in songs that feel more designed than banged out. But this time around the world is one of doom on all sides. The rec\u00adord opens with the ominous low-end churn of \u201cSix Shot Morning.\u201d Chatten sings in a dank baritone about Silicon Valley siphoning our very beings, before offering a line that turns the transhumanist ideology of tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel into ironic pop-ballad poetry: \u201cYou and I living for a million years\/Always, always.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhat follows is a rock album with the heart of a dystopian sci-fi epic. Fontaines are not a band that thinks small. Chatten says he took inspiration for Dopamine Chamber from time he spent in Venice, Italy, pondering the way great civilizations can give way to decay. On the spacious, slamming single \u201cMarianne,\u201d the snare drum hits like a falling anvil, a string section broods, and synths throb like a hangover as Chatten whispers, \u201cYou can follow my lead\/I can help you disappear,\u201d an escapist invitation that feels more like a threat than a promise. Yet, the result is still catchy enough for a drunk pub singalong. \u201cMimesis\u201d is an Eighties synth-pop reverie that offers dire empathy, while \u201cDemolition\u201d pummels and brays like In Utero<\/a>-era Nirvana and gear-grinds like vintage Nine Inch Nails, as we\u2019re offered the appealing proposal \u201cCozy up to my\/Horror show for the\/Callous-hearted, the\/Predeparted.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\tIf our impending AI extermination provides a backdrop for much of this album, Fontaines D.C. certainly aren\u2019t letting the end of all things slow down their musical progress. \u201cOne Man\u201d builds a dream-pop cathedral, awe-inspiring in its intricately latticed melodic grandeur. \u201cTongue\u201d sets teeming, agitated synth chirps atop slow, funky bad-dream drum thwack that sounds like it was recorded in a meat locker, before a head-bobbing piano figure rolls through that sounds like it was borrowed from a gritty 1990s New York hip-hop record. The album\u2019s headline artistic coup is \u201cWhere Is Gone?,\u201d a duet in which Chatten is joined by Rosal\u00eda for a velvet-sunset ballad that goes down like a 2020s spin on the languorous Sixties epics of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThey end the album on \u201cIntimate,\u201d a swirly slo-mo apocalypse of a track that unfolds like an all-ages goth night in the boiler room of Dante\u2019s Inferno. The lyrics offer images of the uber rich pioneering their own eugenic happy place (\u201cBeauty kings\/Beauty queens\/Razor-faced\/With private means\u201d) as the rest of us poor suckers are left to rot amid \u201cthe ruins of the human dream.\u201d But Fontaines aren\u2019t going out like that, at least not yet. As the music slips deeper into its enveloping blackness, they keep reaching out, repeating the refrain \u201cIntimately on your side\/Intimate all through the night\u201d like a last-ditch benediction. It\u2019s a harrowing way to close out an album that hits just right for our nightmare times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"W hen Fontaines D.C. first came out of Dublin with their 2019 debut, Dogrel, they were a fun…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,93898,61,60],"class_list":["post-653053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-fontaines-d-c","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653053","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=653053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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