Fontaines D.C. Search for Elusive Connection in the Post-Punk Banger “Mimesis”

This October, when Fontaines D.C. released Dopamine Chamber, the Irish band’s fifth studio album, the new songs landed like both a soundtrack to and an antidote for our gloomy world. The song “Mimesis” seems to document a broken connection. But it may also be a road map for how to exit the confusing abyss that generates a sense of disappearing.

Perhaps a modern anthem for reconnecting with one another.

Everybody’s Depressed

Singer Grian Chatten describes the existential anxiety many feel in an ever-darkening world. His voice sits tucked inside a post-punk track that recalls the hypnotic bleakness of Joy Division. And it’s that repetition, the “running on a wheel,” as he puts it, that explains how hard it is to connect these days.

Time is never far away for you,
You feel like something in your head is dead inside for real.
Well, everybody’s depressed; we’re running on a wheel,
I’m here to fight your corner, my heart is open.

Chatten travels a long distance to bond. He’s making the effort while the person he’s trying to reach, instead, submits to apathy.

I drove such a long, long way here,
Your indifference won’t make me disappear.
And surely, you’ll wake up in yourself,
But you can’t blame nobody else.

Submitting to the Final Frame

Amid hazy synths and a motorik beat, “Mimesis”, its title of Greek origin, meaning imitation, propels forward like the humdrum rhythm of insipid desolation. But it’s not hopeless.

And time will take you far away, my love,
And feel the everlasting now; eternity is real.
The sun will leave the sky and all the stars reveal,
So close your eyes forever, again, again, again.

Here, Chatten releases from the past. He won’t be tricked by nostalgia or more of the “same old, same old.”

I’m submitting to the final frame,
Long, long waiting for the long, lost game. (Blame nobody else.)
Tired of living in a photograph, (Blame nobody else.)
Same old rattle in the same old laugh.

Like many tracks on Dopamine Chamber, “Mimesis” catalogs a kind of slow disappearance. It’s losing oneself in the artificial, the imitation.

“Can’t blame nobody else,” he says.

Photo by Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage