Fontaines D.C.: a Rosalía-featuring track on the new album, tracklist revealed. Three Italian live dates

Fontaines D.C. have unveiled the full tracklist for “Dopamine Chamber”, their upcoming studio album, out October 16th via XL Recordings, two years on from “Romance”. Among the eleven tracks on the record, “Where Is Gone?” stands out, featuring Rosalía: it's the first time in the Dublin band's history that a guest artist has appeared on one of their albums.

The single

Previewing the new record is “Marianne”, a song with a sumptuous, decadent atmosphere, conceived almost like the opening of velvet curtains in an old Italian theatre. The influence of the 2024 series “Ripley” is reflected in a track built around escape, hedonism and the temptation to disappear, setting against this backdrop a more unsettling question: how much of our imagination and our conscience are we willing to sacrifice in order not to fully witness the catastrophe unfolding around us? Listen to “Marianne” below.

The album

Produced by James Ford, “Dopamine Chamber” was recorded between London, the English countryside and Palermo. It was in the Sicilian capital that Grian Chatten laid down his vocal parts inside a makeshift booth built out of mattresses and cushions. To write the lyrics, the singer also spent long stretches of time between Venice, Vienna and Sicily, chasing a dimension increasingly removed from the geographic and musical coordinates that had defined the band's early records.
Where “Dogrel“, “A Hero's Death” and “Skinty Fia” remained deeply tied, in different ways, to Dublin and Irish identity, and “Romance” had opened up the band's sound toward broader, more spectacular territory, “Dopamine Chamber” seems to push this transformation even further. The new songs move toward colder, more synthetic and disorienting sonorities, weaving together synthesizers, martial drums, samples and triggers, tracks entirely devoid of guitars, and string arrangements inspired by Italian pop of the Sixties, yet projected into a futuristic dimension.

“At its core, the album represents a dopamine chamber,” Chatten explains. “You step inside and we test out these songs that alter your mind or mood. 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 fits a little more tightly to the face. I felt it would be more powerful to leave hope out of it and honestly reflect the ugliness. This record was meant to sound like a warning of catastrophe.” At the heart of “Dopamine Chamber”, then, lies a world suspended between gratification and anguish, in which 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 a landscape where the very mechanisms that govern memes, celebrity and entertainment progressively distort our perception of reality.

It's a transformation that also touches one of the recurring themes in Fontaines D.C.'s history: belonging. “Our albums have always questioned the concept of belonging to a place,” says bassist Conor Deegan. “At first we told the story of Dublin, then of moving away from Dublin, and finally of trying to find romance elsewhere. On this album, the question became: where do you escape to? Maybe inside yourself, or into hedonism, fantasy, aesthetic perfection, eternal youth, or the endless refresh of a screen.”
The tension between attraction and repulsion thus becomes one of the record's driving forces: bright melodies set against dark backdrops, pleasure and fear blurring into one another, technology and humanity increasingly hard to tell apart. “There's this aching feeling of being on the edge of another form of humanity, or non-humanity,” Chatten observes. For guitarist Conor Curley too, the goal was to break decisively with the band's usual reference points: “I was looking for something that pointed toward the future.”

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

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