It’s strange that their most accessible album yet is their darkest. Maybe that says more about the world.

It opens with how being born would sound if you were conscious. The space-age synths over a muffled, liquefied beat. Are you entering the dopamine chamber or leaving it? Explains the 3D baby scan-looking album art.

Six Shot Morning has an album-opening oomph that trails out with a subtle, off-key, robotic arpeggio that could be reprogramming your brain.

“Silicon Valley took a photograph” and “You and I living for a million years” show the distaste for big tech’s unavoidable plans of corporate surveillance and moving our lives online.

Marianne encapsulates Chatten’s stage swagger. Weirdly, it made me feel alive. There’s something about the bouncy drums and plucked bass that immediately adds this floaty confidence to your step. I could spot someone listening to it with headphones on by the way they walked.

It’s one thing they’ve always managed to perfect. The unmistakable rhythms. You could play the drums for Starburster, I Love You, heck, just listen to the first seconds of Roman Holiday and Jackie Down The Line and you’ll know what I mean.

It’s what has an indie disco crowd erupting as soon as the DJ presses play.

I’ve seen some people say Dopamine Chamber has the typical Fontaines lyricism. I’m not sure I agree. Listen to Dublin City Sky, Boys in the Better Land, any of Skinty Fia.

There’s no “met your mother in an early”, “Spits out Brits Out!” in Dopamine Chamber. Not even close.

I Don’t Belong, Was Not Born or Big is filled with enough rebellious fuck you energy to expel Dopamine Chamber to a separate shelf in the record shop. It’s unavoidable.

How can you sing about the problems on home turf when your feet rarely get a chance to touch it in the middle of your world tours?

They moved away from Ireland in their previous couple of records. It happens. It’s what landed Alex Turner on Tranquility Base. A comment on the stamp of the times in general, of heartache, feels at home in comparison.

“Don’t get stuck in the past” - A Hero’s Death

On the topic of moving on, Mimesis has a nod to 80s anthemic synth riffs. The kind you “BA DA DA DADA DA DA” at the top of your lungs and launch pints to. A little confusing when I first heard it on the album, but I’m not against it as a standalone.

The rest of the album runs a subtle heartache tone.

Demolition brings the Fontaines energy that long-standing fans will be craving, but covers the struggles of being able to see every part of someone’s life on social media after a breakup. “Thanks for being at home, thanks for being alone” shows the relief when they’re not out living a life without him.

For me, the masterpiece is Where Is Gone? It’s the pinnacle of their inspiration. Fontaines D.C.’s curated playlist, ‘Deserthead’ from 2019, is everything this song is.

They’ve layered it the way Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood cut theirs, with lines like “[ROSALÍA] I could care less, [GRIAN] so careless”. The raw acoustic guitars of Johnny Cash, the melancholy playfulness of Ariel Pink and twangy guitars of the Beach Boys and Catherine Thompson.

It’s incredible. And ROSALÍA was a mighty fine collaboration.

I love a lot about it. And it’s convinced me that they’re next in line for the James Bond theme.

Parts of the album make you want to wash your hands, others make your pupils dilate as though you’re watching a sunset in the mountains. In either setting it’s cinematic.

The threatening doom of the looped violins in You Miss Me continues the theme. A march, a drudgery, an anguish. A kind that’s rewarding on the other side.

Japan sounds the most uplifting musically yet broaches a view of a one-sided relationship from the outside.

Intimate gives the energy of entering a drug dealer’s den in a New York City apartment, graffiti on the walls with a light smoke engulfing the upper third of the room. Both musically and lyrically.

Dopamine Chamber echoes out into an electronic cluster of fluttery keys.

You were just passing through.