Fontaines D.C.

Fontaines D.C. – Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll – will release their fifth album Dopamine Chamber on 16th October via XL Recordings / Remote Control Records. Produced by James Ford, it’s the follow-up to 2024’s UK platinum-certified Romance – and the sound of a band moving decisively away from the guitar language of their early records and into their most seductive music yet. Preceded by lead single ‘Marianne’, the album arrives like a constellation behind undulating sighs of smog: potent balladry, anthemic melodies glinting through the murk. In a world tipping towards collapse, it asks how pleasure mutates amid peril—and what our pursuit of it reveals about us.

Fontaines D.C. have spent five albums refusing to repeat themselves – from Dogrel (2019) through A Hero’s Death (2020), the UK and Ireland No. 1 Skinty Fia (2022) and the anarchic, kaleidoscopic Romance (2024). Dopamine Chamber is their most radical turn yet: It was made with Ford between London, the English countryside and Palermo, where Chatten recorded vocals in a makeshift booth built from mattresses and cushions. “There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity,” says Chatten. For their fifth album, Fontaines D.C. have built the chamber. What happens to the listener inside it will be the experiment.