Fontaines D.C. Dopamine Chamber. Through a glass darkly

Are we having fun yet? As we slide into a new dystopia of doomscrolling, the relentless tide of AI slop, politics as a soap opera, ecological collapse, and tech bros determined to remake society in their own waxen image, we can probably all agree on one thing - the world is a pretty ugly place right now. The future has arrived and doesn't it look dazzling through your new Meta glasses?

But here are Ireland’s band of a generation to soundtrack it all on the merry waltz into hell that is their new album, Dopamine Chamber.

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It’s a monster of a record that builds on the lurid lushness of 2024’s Romance with sweeping orchestral vistas, the throb of goth pop, and what we used to call cathedrals of sound, during the post-punk nuclear winter of the late seventies. However, Fontaines now come with an unnerving sense of the artificial mutating into the organic and vice versa. Opulence and decay are everywhere on Dopamine Chamber and the sense of desolation and anxiety is only slightly softened by some sparkling melodies and maybe a hint of black humour in Grian Chatten’s lyrics, which are both bitter and playful, sad and resigned. In one of many well-aimed darts at big tech, on opening track Six Shot Morning he sings: "Silicon Valley took a photograph." Later he quips, "woke up in a dream and I was Ameri-can".

Fontaines D.C.: The rise and rise of Ireland's best band

The juddering hugeness of recent single Marianne signaled that the band’s fifth album (in a mere seven years) would be sonically expansive and thematically even bleaker. These 11 new songs expand their musical palette, embracing the goth murk of The Cure and the clean-lined futurism of New Order. They are seeing through a glass darkly and by that they mean the screens of our phones. As Chatten sings on the elegiac One Man, "dopamine chamber, just trying to kill the pain, you can’t escape the feeling once you’ve given it a name."

The singer sought inspiration for the album among the faded grandeur of Venice, Vienna and Sicily. However, he still sounds like a surly baritone at a post-punk cabaret as he croons about seedy glamour, beauty, thwarted desire, and our failure to communicate in the communication age. He is a man out of time and place.

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Alan Corr talks to Oliver Callan about the rise of Fontaines D.C. and previews Dopamine Chamber

The band’s talent for wrapping pop songs in complex arrangements bristling with invention is everywhere and there is a lot going on in James Ford’s layered production. On Six Shot Morning, Chatten’s disembodied, dislocated voice hovers over atonal industrial percussion and the gleam of synthesisers, while the electro-clash indebted Mimesis, another dark tale of obsession and desire, unabashedly rides a huge Peter Hook bassline as Chatten essays another disaffected lyric: "Well, everybody’s depressed/We’re running on a wheel."

Album stand-out Happy For You zones into more intimate romantic matters as it switches between spindly Cure guitar, a metronomic rhythm and a cathartic electric trash, while the sweet pop sound of Japan hides another lyric about domestic dysfunction and exploitation.

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Demolition recalls the disarray of Nirvana at their messiest, with Chatten at his most bug-eyed - "cosy up to my horror show for the callous-hearted, the pre-departed." However all ears will be on stand-out track, Where is Gone, an audacious duet with Spanish singer Rosalía on which she and Chatten exchange doomed tendresses over timpani and kettle drums. It is nothing less than Morricone composing a James Bond theme for the afterlife. Is it Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra? Or maybe Nick Cave and Kylie?

The discordant rattle of Intimate disappears into a kind of Beckett/Yeats nexus where Chatten repeats "dying, dying and dead" like a mantra amid a vortex of synths and battering rams of drums. Somewhere between contempt and pity, he sings about "beauty queens/Razor-faced/With private means."

We’re not sure if this will be a feelgood hit of the summer at Slane next year but it brings to a close a record that voyages to some dark places across a restless and ambitious collection ranging from brute force to tenderness.

It’s intoxicating stuff and like all worthwhile albums, Dopamine Chamber reveals its secrets over time to crystalise into something beautiful and strange. We’re not in the Liberties anymore, Toto.