Get unlimited access to everything VICE has to offer.

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door

VICE Album Reviews, October 16: Fontaines D.C., The Avalanches, World Peace DMT, and More

Blasting those neurotransmitters with this week’s new releases, including records from Two Shell, The Afters, They Are Gutting a Body of Water,  Max Richter, Djrum, and Rick Wakeman.

By Adam Christopher Smith

Share on X (Opens in new window)X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook

Share using Native toolsShareCopied to clipboard

Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffinRead this month’s album reviews here and here.

Fontaines D.C.Dopamine Chamber XLAfter exhaustively touring the last Fontaines D.C. record, frontman Grian Chatten spent the springtime Europemaxxing. For most of us, this means you wake up without an alarm; meet friends for coffee; have lunch with the same friends; start day drinking; and do nothing else. Yet in his case, these travels on the continent resulted in lyrics for Dopamine Chamber, one of the most evocative, astute records of our new present. I mean, honestly, please take a break, mate—you’re making the rest of us look lazy and ignorant.

Across 11 tracks, we’re treated to a selection of audio selfies from his trip through the “world of old European beauty and terrible opulence”: a Viennese homage to Eyes Wide Shut—the paintings of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, Freud’s old home, and its prophetic vision of the perverted elite (now, don’t mind me, but I’ve deleted this next joke because I don’t want to be found dead in mysterious circumstances); Venice: transient, commodified, sinking—the only way to better reflect the city than through this album would be to place a naked woman in a glass tank filled with tourists’ urine; and Palermo, which I have absolutely nothing to say about, funny or otherwise, as, uncoincidentally, it’s the one destination which, to Grian, “felt like a place where people actually lived.” One can only imagine what that would be like.

Jaded, hungover, and—ironically—in dire need of a holiday (I know the feeling), this is the morning after 2024’s Romance, which captured these hungry, cultured young men as they left behind their home city of Dublin in pursuit of, err, romance. Fontaines D.C. are looking for an escape which might not even exist, but must be chased........

© Vice