The British TV institution Later… With Jools Holland has devoted a special episode to Fontaines D.C. The Irish band staged the performance at Alexandra Palace Theatre last week, performing songs from new album Dopamine Chamber. Watch them do “Mimesis,” “Tongue,” “You Miss Me,” and their 2024 radio hit “Favourite” below. The full, 45-minute set is available now to UK viewers on BBC iPlayer.
As the band continues to promote Dopamine Chamber, frontman Grian Chatten has addressed fallout after AI studios were credited in the making of their “Marianne” video. As Chatten tells it, the band only learned of the AI use after the video’s release. “All those main scenes and main effects and stuff were VFX and prosthetics, like the cheeks and everything,” he told The Los Angeles Times’ Julius Miller. “Over 110 people worked on the thing. It was a real huge human effort. But then somewhere in the process, someone from the VFX team I guess used some kind of AI in the workflow. And none of us were told about it. Apparently, not even our label or our management were told about it and it was a real shock.”
He said the band would prevent future snafus by writing an AI ban into contracts. “I was hoping to talk about how I felt about AI in interviews at some point anyway, and then this kind of pulled the rug from under that conversation a little bit,” he said, adding (and here we honor the LA Times’ house style on expletives) that AI in general is “f— terrifying. I was watching a Robin Williams scene from Dead Poets Society when he talks about poetry, literature. These are the things that we stay alive for, and well, that’s exactly what AI threatens to rob from the human race. I’ve seen those articles about those guys who are leaving AI companies because they said that the human race is going to be dead within 10 years. AI is literally rendering our souls obsolete and I think that is true death.”
Next year, Fontaines D.C. head out on a massive headlining tour across North America, Europe, Australia, and a few dates in Japan. Read Pitchfork’s review of Dopamine Chamber.
