Fontaines D.C. have announced their fifth studio album, Dopamine Chamber, out 16th October via XL Recordings, alongside lead single “Marianne”.
Produced by James Ford, the album follows 2024’s UK platinum-certified Romance and marks a shift away from the band’s earlier guitar-driven sound towards something colder and more synthetic, featuring cold synthesiser tones, samples and several tracks without guitars at all. “Marianne”, inspired in part by the 2024 series Ripley, deals with escapism and hedonism. Across the record, the band, Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll, explore how pleasure and dread intertwine against a backdrop of AI, environmental collapse and political violence.
Speaking on the album, Chatten explained: “The album itself is a dopamine chamber. You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you. There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity.”
Fontaines D.C. will play shows across Europe this month before headlining Reading & Leeds and Electric Picnic over the August bank holiday weekend.
Listen to “Marianne” below, and pre-order the album here.