Fontaines D.C.: listen to the new single “Tongue” from the upcoming album “Dopamine Chamber”

Fontaines D.C. have released “Tongue”, the second single taken from their new album “Dopamine Chamber”, due out on October 16 via XL Recordings. The track arrives just weeks after “Marianne”, with which the Irish band officially paved the way for the follow-up to “Romance”, the 2024 album that definitively broadened their sonic horizons.
With “Tongue”, Grian Chatten and co. push even further into the elaborate, layered dimension of their new work. Conor Deegan manipulates the tape speed to distort the bass sound, giving it a swing that recalls a hip-hop sample, while Carlos O'Connell runs Chatten's vocals through a sampler. Around this core, jagged guitars, piano, strings and orchestrations pile up, gradually cracking the track's apparent composure. The band themselves consider it one of the most visceral moments on the album.
The single comes with a video directed by John Angus Stewart and shot in New York, which you can watch below.

The new album

Produced by James Ford, “Dopamine Chamber” will mark a new chapter in the Fontaines D.C. story and will also feature a collaboration with Rosalía: it will be the first time the band has hosted an outside artist on one of their studio albums.
“Dopamine Chamber” will be released on October 16 via XL Recordings, two years on from “Romance”. It was preceded by the first single “Marianne”, a song with a sumptuous, decadent atmosphere, almost imagined as the opening of the velvet curtains of an old Italian theatre. The influence of the 2024 series “Ripley” can be felt in a track built around escape, hedonism and the temptation to disappear, raising a more unsettling question in the background: how much of our imagination and our conscience are we willing to sacrifice in order not to fully witness the catastrophe around us? Listen to “Marianne” below.

While “Dogrel”, “A Hero's Death” and “Skinty Fia” were still deeply tied, in different ways, to Dublin and Irish identity, and “Romance” had opened the Dublin band's sound up towards broader, more spectacular territory, “Dopamine Chamber” seems to push this transformation even further. The new songs move towards colder, more synthetic and disorienting sounds, with synthesizers, martial drums, samples and triggers, tracks that are at times completely devoid of guitars, and string arrangements inspired by Italian pop of the 1960s but transported into a futuristic dimension.
Here below is the official cover art for “Dopamine”.

"At its core, the album represents a dopamine chamber", Chatten explains. "You walk in and we test out these songs that alter your mind or mood on you. I think 'Romance' was 60% human and 40% corrupted by automation and a loss of feeling. This album is a bit more corrupted, let's say 60%: the mask sits a little closer to the face. I felt it would be more powerful to leave hope out and honestly reflect the ugliness. This record needed to sound like a warning of catastrophe."
At the heart of the album, then, is a world suspended between gratification and anguish, where the desire for pleasure and escape coexists with the sense of an imminent collapse. Artificial intelligence, environmental crisis, political violence, algorithms and screen addiction all enter into a landscape where the very mechanisms that govern memes, celebrity and entertainment seem to be gradually warping our perception of reality.

The tracklist for “Dopamine Chamber”

1. Six Shot Morning
2. Marianne
3. Mimesis
4. Happy For You
5. Demolition
6. Tongue
7. One Man
8. Where Is Gone? (with ROSALÍA)
9. You Miss Me
10. Japan
11. Intimate

After four albums built on constant transformation, Fontaines D.C. now seem ready to take another leap, this time into even more artificial and unstable territory, where the pursuit of pleasure can become both an escape route and one of the symptoms of catastrophe.

The Italian shows

The Irish band will also return to Italy for three shows: October 26, 2026 at the Unipol Arena in Casalecchio di Reno, June 18, 2027 at the Ippodromo delle Capannelle for Rock in Roma, and June 19, 2027 at the Ippodromo SNAI San Siro for I-Days Milano.

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