Fontaines D.C. — Grian Chatten, Carlos O'Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll — have spent five albums refusing to repeat themselves. The Dublin-formed five-piece arrived in 2019 with Dogrel, pairing snarling poetry with bolshie four-chord anthems, before A Hero's Death (2020) and the UK and Irish No. 1 Skinty Fia (2022) modulated into stranger, more adventurous sounds. Then came Romance (2024), a profound shift into anarchic, kaleidoscopic craft and the album that took the band from critical favourites to one of the world's biggest breakout acts. It delivered their first entry on the Billboard 200, earned two GRAMMY nominations — Best Rock Album, and Best Alternative Music Performance for "Starburster" — and won International Group of the Year at the 2025 BRIT Awards.

Their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, is released on 16th October 2026 via XL Recordings. Produced by James Ford and made between London, the English countryside and Palermo, where Chatten recorded vocals in a makeshift booth built from mattresses and cushions, it moves decisively away from the guitar language of the early records and into the band's most seductive music yet. The album arrives like a constellation behind undulating sighs of smog: potent balladry, anthemic melodies glinting through the murk. It also features the first guest artist on a Fontaines D.C. album: ROSALÍA, on the duet "Where Is Gone?".

In a world tipping toward collapse, the record asks how pleasure mutates amid peril. "The album itself is a dopamine chamber," says Chatten. "You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you."

Live, the experiment expands: MIDI, samples, triggers and songs with no guitars at all. 2026 has seen the band sell out arenas across the UK and Europe alongside sold-out US shows at Brooklyn's Kings Theatre and Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, with their biggest headline shows yet to follow in 2027.