Fontaines D.C. announce fifth album Dopamine Chamber — and they’ve left the guitars at home

The next chapter of Fontaines D.C. has arrived

Dopamine Chamber, the fifth Fontaines D.C. album, arrives on 16 October.

The band announced it on Tuesday alongside lead single Marianne, RTÉ Entertainment reported. Produced by James Ford and out on XL Recordings, it follows 2024’s platinum-certified Romance, the album that carried Fontaines D.C. to Grammy and Brit nominations.

What Dopamine Chamber actually sounds like

According to a press statement, the album features synthesiser, marching drums, samples and triggers, several songs with no guitars at all, and those 1960s Italian pop strings.

It is, the statement says, “the sound of a band moving decisively away from the guitar language of their early records into something colder, stranger and more synthetic”.

"Thematically it deals with artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence — “all riding the same algorithms as memes, jokes and celebrity culture”. Chatten is blunt about the title.

"The album itself is a dopamine chamber. You step inside and we test these different mind or mood-altering pieces of music on you."

Grian Chatten

‘The mask is wearing the face a little more’

Chatten frames the record as a further slide into the machine age that Romance only flirted with. “I think Romance was maybe 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling,” he says. “This one feels more like 60 per cent corrupted — the mask is wearing the face a little more.”

He also says he deliberately resisted any pull towards easy optimism: “I felt it would be more powerful to leave the hope out and reflect the ugliness honestly. This one needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning.”

Bassist Conor Deegan points to the thread running through all five records. “Our albums have always questioned a sense of place,” he says.

Where to hear Dopamine Chamber in Ireland first

Irish fans do not have to wait until October.

Chatten went to Venice, Vienna and Sicily to find this record. Irish audiences get first crack at it in a field in Laois. Dopamine Chamber is out on XL Recordings on 16 October, with Marianne streaming now.