At almost exactly the midpoint of our conversation about the fifth album made by his band, Fontaines D.C., Grian Chatten said to me, "It's an interesting time to be a self." We'd been talking about the themes on Dopamine Chamber, which comes out on Friday, Oct. 16, and could serve as a soundtrack to the era we live in now, what Chatten calls our "glorious age of distraction."
It's also an interesting time to be a rock band in the mainstream, and that's where Fontaines D.C., which formed in 2014, definitely lives these days. The Irish quintet's next tour has them in stadiums and arenas, and the one guest on Dopamine Chamber is pop's universal "it" girl, the Spanish singer Rosalía.
The 2024 album Romance took Fontaines to another level, earning them two Grammy nominations and their best sales ever, with hits like the sweet and earnest "Favourite." Following it up, Fontaines didn't take the easy way. Instead, they explored new sounds to create a captivating sonic travelogue that somehow connects the decadent beauty of old Europe with the narcotic ethereality of cyberspace.
Things really gel for Fontaines on Dopamine Chamber. Using vintage synthesizers and studio effects, the band builds on the hypnotic energy that has always been its calling card to make something huge and seductive and haunting. I was lucky to speak with Chatten about his evolution as a storyteller and his place within a band that's always growing, but which remains utterly true to itself.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to an extended version of this interview, plus a conversation with Fontaines D.C. bassist Conor Deegan, in the audio at the top of this page, or in the NPR Music podcast.
Ann Powers, NPR: This album comes at a kind of a milestone point in the career of Fontaines. You're playing these huge venues now, and emerging as a truly superstar band at this point. I don't know how you feel about that, but I wondered if the fact that your audience has grown so much influenced the direction this album went in. I mean in a very positive way that you seem to be kind of aiming for a monumental sound to connect with this new level of your career.
Grian Chatten: You know, the fact that there is an audience that has grown and continued to listen and moves with us, I certainly feel like it's a collaboration between ourselves and our audience, if you know what I mean. It's like, through each album, we're kind of getting closer in a spaceship to this black hole or something like that.
Well, I hope you don't fall down the black hole, because then I won't be able to hear your music anymore.
Maybe you'll have already heard it, years ago.
Oh my god, you're blowing my mind. On Dopamine Chamber there's this experience of displacement that you're getting at, and you sing a little bit about [immortality], the hubris of someone who thinks they might live forever. So how does this new album relate to those themes?
I feel like I'm writing about a metaphysical place or an imagined place that represents or reflects where I think we might be headed. And I want to do it with all the trappings and all the details of the things that I find affecting in my life: things that scare me about the future and things that warm me about the past, things that kind of comfort me. I like the idea that it's almost like a spectrum. You know the Italian singer Mina? She came through in the '60s and she maintained a career for decades after, she's still alive, and I'm really in love with her music. And that informed and kind of armed the sense of humanity that I wanted to imbue this record with.
And then on the [other] end of the spectrum is kind of a darker, more industrial … dare I say the cliche word now: dystopian. That's people like John Mouse, who, I don't know if I [should] plug him, or like Depeche Mode and New Order and like Disintegration by The Cure. I wanted the record to feel like it was a distinct place where you walked through and you felt both of these things interacting with each other so that you could kind of get a sense of what we're losing and where we might be headed towards, you know?
Well, a dystopian story is only effective if there is a strong sense of humanity. I think about a film like Under the Skin. I mean, if Scarlett Johansson isn't there in her beauty, it doesn't have the same effect. You need to have that in any dystopian [setting]. You have to have that depth of emotion, and physical sensuality to counter and be in a dynamic relationship with machines. So maybe that's what you're going for?
Bjork does it. She's got such a beautiful, emotive and human voice. To have that piercing through the industrial music on, like, Homogenic, she had it sewn up there. I really like the feeling in Ridley Scott's films. You know, they might be isolated in a vacuum in space like how many thousands of miles or light years away from planet Earth, but they're still falling in love with each other and they've got a job to do, and a mission.
I [heard] something you said about your process to Jools Holland. You said you like to write on toilet paper because it has to go in the bin, which I thought was a little bit of that Irish humour, perhaps, but also the idea for a writer to say, "I want to cling to a notion of ephemerality about my own process." Does that free you up? The idea that your lyrics, your words, your poetry moves through space and might dissolve?
I think it's going to sound painfully, incredibly Irish of me but it's very it's important for me to recognize the transience of my own ideas and my own work, particularly before I kind of actually kind of cast them in stone in the recording and put it out there, you know, into the into the astral plane. You know, I think it's important to consider the fact that each thing I write is doomed or is to be forgotten unless I decide to actually sit down and do something about it. And I think what that does — I don't know if this makes sense — but what that does to me as a writer is it builds up my confidence in myself as the generator of the ideas, as opposed to kind of becoming beholden to one lucky burst of an idea.
But then, you know, you're writing about digital spaces on this record, and there's a sense of, everything lasts forever in digital space. I wonder if that was something you were thinking about.
That very concept of everything lasting forever immediately just makes me feel sick with how meaningless that renders everything. Like, things acquire their meaning because they're ephemeral. People love each other fiercely because they know that they're going to get old and die, you know?
A thread on this record is cinema, the idea of life as a movie. But also I know you're very inspired by films. Let's just talk about "Marianne" for a minute. I know it was inspired by the Netflix version of The Talented Mr. Ripley with Andrew Scott. When you watch something like that, how do you translate it into a song?
For me, often it takes me a while to process things.
That's healthy.
It's not like I watched the first couple of episodes and started writing things down. It kind of ruminated for a while until I realized that the feelings I wanted to express, I was kind of like, "Oh yeah, that's how I felt when I was watching that thing." And then I kind of, at least emotionally, just thought about Andrew Scott's performance and that cinematography, the lingering shots of Italy and someone running away and, I suppose, trying to replace a human soul with material possessions and a life that isn't your own. For some reason [it was] profoundly resonant for me.
I feel like decadence is a theme that connects that song with its inspiration. And I think one question that kind of runs throughout this album is, are we at the end of something, or are we at the beginning of something? The digital age is a decadent age. You know, things are ending. You know, the earth itself is threatened. And then in talking about relationships, [there's a] trickiness sometimes of your writing where I'm not sure if you're opening your arms or if you're pushing people away.
I think I just want to make people really feel things about the world that they live in. Because it's such a terrifying world at the moment, and I think a lot of human response, which is a survival mechanism, obviously — and I don't blame anyone and I do it, of course, as well — but we run away, we hide and we distract ourselves. And we're in a glorious age of distraction. And, as you said, decadence. It really feels hugely like a cusp time. But I don't know what's next necessarily.
On the new song "Tongue," you're talking about an individual's confusion, just a kind of a desperation to put yourself right. And I wonder if going into a personal place telling an almost physical story of that experience of confusion says something about our societal experience of that?
Because of the modes of expression that we experience these days, it's not always easy to know or to trust exactly how far your words are going or how much they matter. Like, we're all kind of shouting into the void until we go viral for something that doesn't necessarily represent us. The very concept of the self is being pulled apart and sold for parts. It's just an interesting time to be a self.
That's a very David Cronenberg thing to say. I know that the band created the tracks and then you and James [Ford, the producer of Dopamine Chamber] worked together [on the lyrics and vocals]. We've been talking a lot about heavy things and big themes. I'm just curious if those themes coalesced for you once you heard the music, or if you walked in with those themes, or you gave instructions or had a conversation with your bandmates about it before they recorded the tracks.
Well, it feels like a different part of the brain, more and more so for me anyway. Almost like I allowed the music to inform itself and not try and be too conscious about what things are about on a cerebral level. We wanted to kind of get the tone right, of futuristic, but also kind of like real, like luscious strings. On "Where Is Gone," we kind of subvert a lot of the strings with this, this instrument called the therevox, which is kind of like a theremin, but there's an eerie, kind of guttural quality to [it]. And it's definitely something a little bit more dystopian, I suppose. It subverts and kind of undermines the strings. Then once that place is fully created, then I can then I can step into it and kind of write about what it's like to be there.
Since we're talking about that song, I think it's a great moment to talk about your duet partner, Rosalía. I feel a kinship between you two in terms of your ambition, your desire to make music that goes beyond the frame and connect with other elements of art.
I've always had a sneaking suspicion that there is almost like — personally, I can't speak for the rest of the band — almost like one kind of grand thing that I'm trying to say that I'm trying to impart on on the world before I, before I get old and die, you know what I mean? There's like one thing that I'll always be chasing. I've got a suspicion that her heart is similar to mine. … I mean, she's such an incredible arranger and composer and lyricist. It's just so humbling that she was into singing on something that we had arranged. It's a career high for me, for sure.
Before we part, I do want to ask you about a couple of collaborations that took place in this time between Romance and Dopamine Chamber. You contributed two tracks to the HELP(2) [benefit] record, which is a record I absolutely love. And for the track "Flags," you worked with a bunch of different people, but particularly Damon Albarn. I thought that was interesting because he might be kind of a role model for you, the way he's done his career.
It's difficult to not get drunk on the passion that someone like Damon has for music. There's a kind of like a, there's a, there's a borderline martyrdom, you know? He's kind of decided long ago that he's checking out and he'll catch up with everyone when we're all in our 80s. But that's a life well lived, you know?
Fontaines also contributed a cover of Sinéad O'Connor's great song "Black Boys on Mopeds" [to that compilation]. Sinead is one of my favorite artists of all time. That song is such an incredible choice.
My mom got me into Sinéad O'Connor. She'd always sing some Sinéad O'Connor songs, like, especially when she'd had a few glasses of wine. She always sounded like 16 years old again. Every time she sang at home. And still does when she sings. So I was born and raised to revere Sinead.
Why that song in particular?
I felt like it was relevant to think about things in terms of, politically, things that were happening — or things that are happening — in the U.K. and I would say how it's complicit in what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank. And I felt like all of the themes of that song still echo through today. So it was just a bit of a no brainer, you know?
Well, speaking of politics, you've toured with Kneecap, and I know you all are friends and connected and they have really taken very risky stances. They have become emblematic of how musicians can do politics in a public space. To some [they're] controversial, but the commitment is so intense and so impossible to miss. For Fontaines it doesn't feel like your music touches politics in such an explicit way. And I wondered how you think about politics in your music, and what's the most effective thing for you personally as an artist?
I like to do things in a less explicit and more implicit way through our writing and through our music. But, I'll still be explicit in between songs when I say, "Free Palestine."
It's been interesting to see the response of Irish musicians to this particular issue because it has been so embraced. Why does the message Free Palestine resonate so strongly with Irish musicians?
Well, because, you know, the Irish people know all about genocide. The thing that is called the famine was a decision to starve the people of Ireland, to halt all trade and to seize the goods and continue the flow of other sources of food out of the country. So Ireland knows all about the feeling. And it's just one of those things of, if we don't stand together against the oppressor, then we are the oppressor, effectively. So it's just a very easy step to take, mentally, for an Irish person.
We haven't talked that much about the band. As Fontaines has grown and evolved and hit new levels, you've stayed together. The unit seems very secure. What's that been like growing up with these guys? And what do you envision for the future with your band?
I really have a dewy-eyed idea of us having Christmas together when we're older with our kids running around our feet, you know, I really do. I think and I hope they all do as well. Someone asked me this the other day and I just said, "Let's just kind of hug before you talk pretty much every day," you know? It's a good leveller, I think.
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