Fontaines D.C. – ‘Dopamine Chamber’ review: a doom-ridden escape from the band of the decade

“To be creatively understood by too many people feels like flies settling all over your clothes and all over your face,” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten told NME in his typically vivid and poetically unsettling manner on the eve of their last album ‘Romance’. “Every now and again you have to fucking shake them off, just to see who you are again.” READ MORE: At home with Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten: “Our personality is bigger than the sound that we make” After the neon shock and anti-nostalgia sentiment of the genre-defying ‘Romance’, there were certainly no flies on Dublin’s finest. But then what? A winning formula that turned one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years into a stadium-filling festival headliner would be one for most to stick to, but comfort is rigor mortis for Fontaines. Add to that, the rot of the world itself. These are bleak times: societal and environmental collapse, the digital world fracturing from reality, horror fatigue, the works. Coming up for air and searching for his muse, Chatten travelled to destinations of “faded grandeur” in Venice, Vienna and Sicily to emerge with a sense of “catastrophic warning” for album five. That quest for escape ...