Fontaines D.C. share ‘Tongue,’ the second single from ‘Dopamine Chamber,’ with a John Angus Stewart video shot in New York City
Fontaines D.C. have always been fascinated by the damage words can do, but on ‘Tongue‘ they let the machines do the talking. On Wednesday (September 30), the Dublin five-piece released the song, the second single from their fifth album ‘Dopamine Chamber’, alongside a video directed by John Angus Stewart and filmed in New York City. Landing just over two weeks before the album arrives on October 16 via XL Recordings, it is the strongest evidence yet that the band’s drift away from guitar-band orthodoxy is not a detour but a destination.
Where lead single ‘Marianne’ was lush and opulent, ‘Tongue’ is cold to the touch. Grian Chatten‘s hook pictures a lover whose words are both ruinous and addictive, and the song treats that cruelty less as a wound than as a habit. It is a love song only in the way a bruise is a souvenir. It begins in a register of flat, stoic melancholy before cracking open into something more violent, with crashing cymbals and eerie guitar tearing at its composure.
The Sound of Corruption
The menace is engineered. Bassist Conor Deegan altered the tape speed of his part, a trick associated with Prince, to give it the slouching, pitched looseness of a sampled hip-hop bass line. Guitarist Carlos O’Connell, meanwhile, fed Chatten’s vocal through a sampler and bent its pitch until it sounds like a hostile alien transmission. Guitarist Conor Curley frames the approach as continuity rather than rupture: “We continued where Romance left off, leaving the live-band elements until they were really needed.”
That continuity matters. ‘Romance’, the 2024 album that earned the band a Mercury Prize nomination, was already a record about humanity under pressure, and Chatten has described it as only partly human, with the rest given over to automation and numbness. ‘Tongue’ tips that ratio further. The band still sounds like a band, but one that has learned to distrust its own instincts.
Bridges, Blue Light and Brooklyn
Stewart’s video matches the song’s chill. The band ride on top of a tour bus through New York at night, washed in blue light, their faces blurred as they mouth the words while the bus crosses a bridge. It is a simple image, and an unsettling one: a group of men in motion who never quite come into focus.
New York has been the song’s proving ground. Fontaines D.C. first played ‘Tongue’ at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre on September 21, and after clips of the performance circulated, some listeners heard Korn in it. It is less of a stretch than it sounds, given that the band spoke openly to NME in 2024 about their love of the nu-metal group. They have also been road-testing unreleased songs ‘Six Shot Morning’ and ‘Happy For You’, the latter premiered at Leeds Festival.
What ‘Dopamine Chamber’ Promises
The album’s tracklist confirms ‘Where Is Gone?’ featuring ROSALÍA, the first guest vocalist the band has ever brought onto one of their records. On paper, that pairing reads as a pop crossover. On a record this deliberately warped, it promises something more volatile. It follows a busy stretch of outside work, including contributions to the Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man soundtrack and War Child’s ‘Help(2)’ benefit album, where Chatten joined Damon Albarn and Kae Tempest on ‘Flags’.
The stakes have rarely been higher. After their Reading 2026 headline set, NME called it “a deserved coronation from the band of our time,” and arena dates across the UK and Europe follow later this year, with shows in India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Europe booked for 2027. ‘Tongue’ suggests Fontaines D.C. intend to meet that scale not by getting bigger, but by getting stranger.
