Fontaines DC review, Dopamine Chamber – A masterpiece from the greatest band of their generation

Fontaines DC’s fifth album ‘Dopamine Chamber’ is a dystopian masterpiece - (Ewen Spencer)

There’s a reverence to Fontaines DC’s Dopamine Chamber, the Irish rock band’s fifth album – which turns out to be their masterpiece. Just as their second album, A Hero’s Death, felt like a recoiling from the hype that surrounded their Mercury Prize-shortlisted 2019 debut, Dogrel, so does this feel like a reaction, of sorts, to their 2024 triumph, Romance. That fourth album bristled and swaggered, owning their newly claimed status as arena headliners – the greatest band of their generation. Dopamine Chamber is just as ambitious, if not more so, but it is ominous too, holding up a dark mirror to our dark times.

The tension that runs through the record makes sense when you learn that, years after they first played in Sicily, at a small festival outside of Palermo in 2019, frontman Grian Chatten returned – perhaps pulled by the same force that has lured artists, philosophers and poets there for centuries. Surrounded by what he described as “a sense of oldness”, he and producer James Ford built a fort from pillows and mattresses, like children. Sicily exists on this knife’s edge, of young and ancient, life and death. So does Fontaines’ music.