In Palermo, Grian Chatten sang into a booth built from mattresses and cushions. That makeshift room is where the vocals for Dopamine Chamber took shape, the fifth Fontaines D.C. album, made with the producer James Ford between London, the English countryside and the Sicilian capital, BrooklynVegan reported when the record was announced in August.
Now the tracklist is out, and it holds a first. Track eight, “Where Is Gone?”, features ROSALÍA, the first guest artist ever to appear on a Fontaines D.C. record, according to XS Noize. Dopamine Chamber is due on 16 October through XL Recordings.
A Band That Never Had a Guest
For a band this visible, going five albums without a featured artist is unusual. XS Noize traces the line from the post-punk urgency of Dogrel and A Hero’s Death through the darker textures of Skinty Fia to the wider sound of Romance. The band are Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll, and until now no other artist has been credited on one of their records.
The Bandcamp pre-order lists 11 songs: “Six Shot Morning”, “Marianne”, “Mimesis”, “Happy For You”, “Demolition”, “Tongue”, “One Man”, “Where Is Gone?” with ROSALÍA, “You Miss Me”, “Japan” and “Intimate”. The guest spot lands in the second half of the record rather than as a trailer for it, and the band have let “Marianne” do the introducing.
The album comes on LP, deluxe LP, CD, cassette and digital. The cassette carries alternate artwork with a fold-out J-card, and the Bandcamp listing notes that “Marianne” is available now as part of the pre-order.
Fewer Guitars in the Room
The bigger change is in the instruments. BrooklynVegan reports that the band brought synthesizers, samples, triggers, marching drums and strings influenced by 1960s Italian pop into the sessions, and that several songs do not feature guitars at all. Curley said he was looking for sounds that pointed into the future. The band’s own description, carried by The Line of Best Fit, calls it a colder, stranger and more synthetic record than anything they have made.
Ford is the constant. He produced Romance too, and The Line of Best Fit notes his work as a member of The Last Shadow Puppets and with Arctic Monkeys, Blur and Gorillaz. So the change in the room is the band’s choice rather than a new pair of hands at the desk.
Chatten framed it in the title. “The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” he said. “You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.” He described Romance as roughly 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and this record as tipping the other way, with the hope deliberately left out so it could land as a warning. The Line of Best Fit lists the pressures behind it: artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence, sitting alongside memes, jokes and celebrity culture.
Deegan put the same idea in terms of place. Their albums, he said, have always been about location: Dublin first, then being away from Dublin, then looking for romance somewhere else. This time the question was where you escape to. Chatten went looking for lyrics in Venice, Vienna and Sicily while the album was being made, NME reported.
Marianne and the Ripley Connection
The answer, on the lead single at least, is somewhere sunlit and dangerous. “Marianne” was inspired in part by the 2024 thriller series Ripley and deals with escapism and hedonism, according to NME, which called it cinematic synth-noir. Its five-star single review heard “the elegiac synth majesty of Depeche Mode” meeting “a widescreen David Lynch scene of lush strings”. One line from Chatten is an invitation that sounds like a trap: follow my lead, I can help you disappear. NME set it against the last album’s opening statement: where “Starburster” was “a sharp shock and intake of breath”, “Marianne” is “an opening scene set in opulent colour and dizzying sound”.
The video was directed by Dave Meyers, whose credits include Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” and Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE”, according to the album’s Bandcamp notes. A mattress-lined vocal booth and a director of Meyers’ standing sit on the same release, which says something about how wide the band’s reach now is.
The songs were road-tested first. After their first shows in nearly a year, including a BBC session at Maida Vale on 31 July, the band began playing new material at shows in Spain, and NME reports that “Marianne” and the album’s opener, “Six Shot Morning”, both featured at those summer comeback dates. At La Route du Rock in France on 15 August they brought out Kurt Vile for “Roman Holiday”, a Skinty Fia song Chatten told Rolling Stone UK in 2022 was inspired by watching Vile play a relaxed sunset set in Croatia.
A Summer of Headline Sets
The record arrives at the end of the biggest live summer the band have had. The Slane Castle announcement came after headline shows at Reading, Leeds and Electric Picnic across a single weekend, the castle noted, and RTÉ pointed out that the Electric Picnic set was their first as headliners of the festival, after earlier appearances further down its bill. A short US run was booked for September around Shaky Knees in Atlanta, Sea.Hear.Now in Asbury Park and Ohana Festival in Dana Point, BrooklynVegan reported.
That is a lot of big outdoor stages for a band whose new record deliberately turns the guitars down. How songs built on synths, triggers and strings translate to a festival field is the open question of the next year, and the Slane shows will be the largest test of it.
What Romance Set Up
Dopamine Chamber follows the most successful record the band have made. According to Bandcamp, Romance debuted at No. 2 in the UK, where it has since gone platinum, and gave them their first entry on the Billboard 200. It earned two Grammy nominations, for Best Rock Album and for Best Alternative Music Performance with “Starburster”, won International Group of the Year at the 2025 BRIT Awards, took the album award at the 2024 Rolling Stone UK Awards and Ireland’s Choice Music Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
The gap between the two records was busy. BrooklynVegan lists “It’s Amazing To Be Young”, released as a standalone single in 2025 and later added to the deluxe Romance, a cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds” for War Child’s HELP(2) compilation, and Chatten’s appearance with Damon Albarn and Kae Tempest on “Flags” from the same compilation. NME adds contributions to the Peaky Blinders: Immortal Man soundtrack.
Two Nights at Slane Castle
The live plans have already outgrown the album cycle. At the end of their first Electric Picnic headline set on 30 August, an image pointing to Slane Castle appeared on the screens, and the next morning the band confirmed a show there on Saturday 26 June 2027, RTÉ reported. Hayley Williams, Damien Dempsey and Madra Salach are on the bill. Two days later, demand added a second night on Sunday 27 June.
The venue carries its own history. Fontaines D.C. will be only the third Irish act to headline Slane, after Thin Lizzy, who played the first concert there in 1981, and U2, the castle’s announcement notes. Tickets start at €89.25, including a €1 donation to Focus Ireland. It is a busy summer for the estate: Oasis are due there on 4 and 5 September 2027 on the Live ’27 route.
Before any of that, the record has to land. Dopamine Chamber arrives on 16 October, and NME reported in August that a wider headline tour would be announced to support it. On the evidence of “Marianne”, the room has changed more than the band has, and the first voice they have ever let into it belongs to ROSALÍA.
About Author
