Fontaines D.C.'s Conor Curley on Dopamine Chamber: "It's a dark, twisted kind of place"

Ahead of the release of Dopamine Chamber this Friday, Fontaines D.C.'s Conor Curley has offered further insights into the "dark, twisted" world of the album – as part of an extensive interview with Hot Press.

Boldly expanding the dystopian world we were introduced to on 2024's Romance, the new album finds the band deliberately leaning into a sound that’s more synthetic, and less immediately human.

“We were stepping into a newer territory with Romance, in terms of starting to use keyboards and stuff like that,” Curley tells Hot Press. “So that blueprint had been set, a little bit, for this one. We had figured out how to work – building tracks in the control room, and not just playing them live. And we built on that.”

Fontaines knew they wanted to incorporate those electronic elements even more extensively this time round – with Curley saying he drew inspiration from bedroom producers and "amazing" DIY-minded artists like “RIP Swirl, untitled (halo), Double Virgo, and james K."

As with Romance, producer James Ford proved crucial to bringing the five-piece’s ever-expanding vision to life.

“He has such an incredible ear, for electronic music especially,” Curley says of Ford. “I feel like he was in a really playful place. He was really enjoying the process of figuring out how to do these sounds.”

Since working on Romance, however, Ford has spoken openly about his health struggles –  with the producer having been diagnosed with leukaemia, after becoming seriously ill in December 2024. He still managed to produce this year’s star-studded War Child album, HELP(2) – which featured Fontaines D.C., alongside the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Arctic Monkeys – remotely, from his hospital bed, while undergoing treatment.

“There was a period of time where it wasn’t looking like he was going to be able to do the record,” Curley says of Dopamine Chamber. “But in fairness to him, he’s such a strong person – and whenever the timings worked out, and he was able to, he’d go to the studio. He really wasn’t taking anything for granted. That’s what he’s on this earth to do – make records, and be involved in music.”

In contrast to the dark, wintery period in which the album was written, Curley recalls there being "a lightness to the recording sessions" – with band able to head outside and kick a Gaelic football around when the sun broke through.

But there’s no denying that the world Fontaines have captured on Dopamine Chamber is a much more menacing one than that of Romance.

As Grian said around the new album’s announcement, if Romance was “60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling,” then Dopamine Chamber “feels more like 60 per cent corrupted – the mask is wearing the face a little more.”

“A lot of the world of Fontaines now exists on this online thing,” Curley says of the inspiration behind those themes. “It’s such a negative thing to interact with – to keep up with what your ‘online thing’ is doing as a band.

“People want to be in the position where they can be like, ‘Oh, I never use my phone from this time to this time’, or whatever,” he adds. “It’s like we have these accepted addictions.”

To Curley, the ‘dopamine chamber’ represents “a forced addiction, or a forced sort of place.”

“It’s getting into the realm of taking away free will – but through spikes in pleasure,” he resumes. “It’s a dark, twisted kind of place.”

The gritty, genre-splicing ‘Tongue’ marks a bold departure for the band – which Curley credits to “listening to a lot more Kendrick Lamar, and more hip-hop backstage.”

After the intensity of that track, and the run of songs before it, the tender mid-album pairing of ‘One Man’ and ‘Where Is Gone?’ feels almost like taking a breath – as if something organic has infiltrated the album’s largely synthetic world.

“With us, I feel there always has to be a kind of a reset,” the guitarist considers. “I think our records always go like that. By having that lighter, acoustic stuff, it lets you push the darker stuff darker.”

And the darkness is never far away – with the characters right across Dopamine Chamber contending with feelings of emptiness, loneliness, insecurity and depression.

“I feel like our songs never have the answer to the anguish,” Curley notes. “There’s never really a declaration of what to do, in any of our music. It’s always just examples of pain and isolation or something like that – so that people can feel it as well. And that’s the thing, I think, that people have connected with.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Curley talks Slane Castle, AI, Macklemore, Rosalía, Fred again., Greta Thunberg, Mayo, Monaghan, Manhattan and more.

Read the full cover story interview with Fontaines D.C. in the current issue of Hot Press – in shops now, and available to order online below: