Last week, the intertextual king of lyricism Grian Chatten delivered Fontaines D.C.’s fifth studio album, Dopamine Chamber. Written largely in Vienna, the city’s cultural riches certainly pay their dues across its 43 minutes. The fin-de-siècle anxieties of Freud and Schnitzler, and the blood-drawing bite of Klimt and Schiele’s raw, transcendental work clearly colour Dopamine Chamber’s overtones as it crystallises the fundamentals of human experience in a hi-tech world.
Bassist Conor Deegan cited French sociologist Bruno Latour’s book After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis as a key inspiration too – a meditation on humanity’s eternal and irreversible impact on the natural world. The fatiguing guilt of having stained the natural world with our bloody handprints is a feeling carried over from the band’s last album, Romance, to Dopamine Chamber. Listen to ‘Mimesis,’ for instance: the manic punk energy of both ends melts under an oppressive heaviness in the middle, with a high-pass filter and delay on the drums and vocals as the track becomes anchored by a slouching tempo.
I’m a fiend for a stabby piano part (think ‘A Lucid Dream’ – Live Version) and the use of strings, both of which instate an eloquence that spreads like butter through the crashing outro of ‘Mimesis.’ Still, this is common among the entire album’s dynamism; heard also in the eye-watering vamp of violins in ‘You Miss Me,’ which rises beautifully in the chorus. As a band that started as a poetry group, the Yeatsian play with pause also comes as no surprise (see ‘Where Is Gone?’ at 3:10). In ‘Demolition,’ the bathetic silence on the downbeat falsely relieves us, before we are crushed by a wall of sound on beat two, creating an obsessive syncopation that mirrors a dopamine crash.
The open hi-hat chokes in the “break-up song written as a thank-you letter” demonstrate a breath-holding technique used across the band’s discography, but in Dopamine Chamber, this seems to work more effectively than the panic attack we hear in ‘Starburster’ from Romance.
This is a new sound for a new world. Ridley Scott’s cinematic sci-fi powerhouses Blade Runner and Alien also informed the album, but this doesn’t just manifest in the instrumentals’ futuristic textures. Thorough enjoyers of science fiction, like Fontaines D.C., are also aware of the genre’s exhibition of universal humanity despite oppressive circumstances. So, despite its sonic futurism, the universality of its themes is how immediacy is breathed into every track. This album, infused with the old-time belter spirit of an Irish pub, is nevertheless ever-intricate and adoringly repulsive – equally worthy of both stadiums and English classrooms.
“Fontaines D.C. performing in 2019” by Paul Hudson is licensed under “CC BY 2.0“
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