Fontaines D.C. use a Prince-style bass trick on new single ‘Tongue’

Fontaines D.C. have shared new single ‘Tongue’, the second song lifted from their forthcoming fifth studio album, Dopamine Chamber, out October 16th.

The track arrives with a video directed by John Angus Stewart and filmed by the band in New York City, following first single ‘Marianne’. Guitarist Conor Curley has said the song continued where ‘Romance’ left off, holding back the live-band elements until they were genuinely needed. Bassist Conor Deegan built the track’s slouchy low end by manipulating tape speed, a technique often associated with Prince, giving the bass the loose, pitched character of sampled hip-hop. Guitarist Carlos O’Connell pushed Grian Chatten’s vocal through a sampler, distorting its pitch until it sounds beamed in like a transmission.

Dopamine Chamber follows 2024’s UK platinum-certified Romance, moving further from the band’s early guitar language into their most seductive music yet, exploring how pleasure mutates in a world tipping toward collapse, and what our pursuit of it says about us. Chatten has described the album plainly: “the album itself is a dopamine chamber.”

Dopamine Chamber is out October 16th.

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