The Irish Punks Who Know Their Yeats
For years now, pop music has been suffused with a vague, or coded, malaise. It’s increasingly evident that everyone feels dread and anxiety about the apparent grimness of the world, though they stop short from saying too much about the particulars. (It remains shocking that Macklemore, a forty-three-year-old white rapper from Seattle, is shaping up to be this year’s most precise and explicit political agitator.) Perhaps our meme-addled brains have grown resistant to earnest pronouncements of any sort, or maybe the unambiguous declarations of yesteryear (“War / What is it good for? / Absolutely nothin’!”) simply don’t vibe in an era of uber-hygienic corporate partnerships. These days, music that feels political tends to chronicle a grim internal collapse—opining not on war itself, but on the duress it incites within.
It’s hard to think of a rock band that captures private existential terror better than Fontaines D.C., a young and brainy quintet from Dublin, made up of the vocalist Grian Chatten, the guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell, the bassist Conor Deegan, and the drummer Tom Coll. This month, the group will release its gorgeous fifth album, “Dopamine Chamber.” (The title feels like a pithy euphemism for “cellphone.”) Most of the new songs wrestle with how to seek pleasure while remaining hyperaware of the devastations of the world, and how that tension can make happiness itself feel like a vice. Recently, Chatten, who writes most of the group’s lyrics, told the Times a story about going to see a movie with his headphones in and attempting to actualize an ambient cognitive dissonance, a feeling of being in the world but not quite of it. “The sense of isolation from that was unreal,” he said. Chatten’s narrators are stuck in a perpetual apartness—desperate for safety and connection, but repeatedly failing to find it.
Fontaines D.C. (the name alludes to the “Godfather” character Johnny Fontane, while the “D.C.,” which was added later, stands for Dublin City) formed in 2014, when its members were still undergraduates studying music at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute Dublin. Musically, the band is probably most indebted to post-punk, with a whiff of New Wave and electronica. On “Dopamine Chamber,” I hear echoes of Depeche Mode, the Prodigy, Gorillaz, Killing Joke, Interpol, and occasionally the Stooges. The group’s début LP, “Dogrel,” was released by Partisan Records in 2019, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize that year. Though “Dogrel” is rough and rowdy, the band’s early interviews are nonetheless stippled with highbrow asides. In 2019, Deegan opined to the Guardian about the bleak arrival, in Dublin, of tech companies and other gentrifying forces: “I think romantic Ireland is dead and gone,” he said, quoting a line from Yeats’s “September 1913,” a century-old poem lamenting the city’s poetic void. (Yeats was reacting to William Martin Murphy, a loathsome newspaper baron who opposed plans to build an art gallery to house a collection of nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings.) Chatten piped up to complete the stanza: “It’s with O’Leary in the grave!” There’s something delightfully incongruous about a crew of twentysomething punks bantering via the casual evocation of Yeats; in the same interview, Chatten also said that he was inspired by the “carnage” of the Pogues’ début, which he described as “so raucous but at the same time so intelligent.” That particular pairing—viciousness and smarts—feels scarce these days, when the world’s most powerful institutions seem to prefer that we be anodyne and dumb.
The band has always resisted, or at least decried, the gnarlier parts of modernity: numbness, greed, solipsism. On “Starburster,” a pummelling single from “Romance,” the band’s fourth album—which was nominated for two Grammys, Best Rock Album and Best Alternative Performance—Chatten writes about seeking relief during a panic attack: “I’m gon’ hit your business if it’s momentary blissness,” he repeats, before sucking in air in a way that suggests he has recently been dragged unconscious from a swimming pool. (Since first hearing the phrase, I have often thought that “momentary blissness” might in fact be the reigning currency of our time.) There’s something so youthful and sneering about a song like “Starburster,” which teems with the type of belligerence that comes easily to someone who has already chosen oblivion. Yet it’s also unmistakably pretty, a wash of hazy synthesizers, guitars, looping strings, and a gargantuan beat. The band is at its most remarkable in moments like this, where it figures out how to marry nihilism and tenderness.
Since “Dogrel,” Fontaines D.C. has been drifting toward a dreamier, almost Lynchian vision of a dystopian present, and that sound has perhaps reached an apotheosis on “Dopamine Chamber.” The album was produced by James Ford, one half of the electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco; Ford has also produced records for Geese, Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Blur, and Depeche Mode, and has a particular knack for making songs sound both verdant and raw. “Six Shot Morning,” which opens the record, is echoing and cinematic: “Silicon Valley took a photograph / Fork tongue kissing in a ten-foot bath / You and I living for a million years / Always,” Chatten moans.
Many of the lyrics on “Dopamine Chamber” concern obliteration of one sort of another. On the single “Marianne,” a lush and gothic synth-pop song about lurching toward emptiness, Chatten’s voice sounds pure, almost menacing: “This year / You should come and stay here / You can follow my lead / I can help you disappear,” he sings on the chorus. One of my favorite new songs is “Where Is Gone?,” a moody, propulsive duet with Rosalía that recalls Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” a careening murder ballad from 1995. Both songs sound romantic, but are actually about catastrophic collapse. On the chorus, Chatten and Rosalía let their voices swell in a kind of perverse ecstasy:
Though the band is hugely popular in the U.K., it has not quite broken through in the U.S. I first heard a Fontaines D.C. song in November, 2020, when Iggy Pop played “Love Is The Main Thing,” a cut from “A Hero’s Death,” the group’s second album, on his BBC radio program: “Really good. Really, really good. A lot of sadness in that music,” Iggy said, his voice throaty and grave. “That is a really, really true and well cut lyric, and a really good beat to that, too, and a beautiful melody, well-stated.” When “A Hero’s Death” was released in the U.K., it very nearly kept Taylor Swift, who had just released “folklore,” out of the No. 1 spot on the British charts. “Dopamine Chamber” might be the record that pushes Fontaines D.C. to a less localized stardom, in part because it feels like such an apt and mesmerizing reflection of modern American life, during a moment in which the only thing people seem to agree on is that everyone feels alone. ♦