“Am I allowed to say it if nobody’s gonna listen?” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten asks on “Tongue,” a track from the band’s fifth studio album, Dopamine Chamber. Even before the group became a stadium-headlining act in the U.K. and their native Ireland, they never seemed particularly humble or reticent. If anything, the band’s gestures—not to mention their music—are growing larger by the day.

Dopamine Chamber’s best songs lean into sinister undertones with relish. With its rumbling keyboards, “Six Shot Morning” opens the album with a sense of unease: It could be mistaken for a love song—“It’s you and I living for a million years, always,” Chatten sings—but it’s actually about our modern life under constant surveillance. “Marianne” likewise speaks to living at the center of a spectacle: “I can help you disappear/Cinematic feeling/Understand this is your life.”

Besides the obvious acknowledgment of toxic online culture, the album’s title is intended as a reference to the music itself. Dopamine Chamber is, without a doubt, a rock album, but it’s dressed in heaps of electronic elements, channeling the post-grunge period of the 1990s, when guitar bands discovered drum loops and samples.

Elsewhere, “Mimesis” pays tribute to New Order, but the album’s synth dalliances give way to Britpop retreads like “One Man,” which suggests an outtake from the Verve’s Urban Hymns. Chatten’s voice resembles Noel Gallagher’s, right down to his slight sneer. He’s a terrific ranter, as evidenced by tracks like “Intimate,” singing with a not-quite-sprechgesang flow and delivering dialect-specific rhymes like “American” and “plane.”

When Fontaines D.C. operates at a more measured pace, as on “Where Is Gone?,” a duet with Rosalía, Dopamine Chamber still maintains a consistent thrust. But even the album’s most experimental moments don’t expand on the vocabularies of electronic music that U2 and others were using in the ’90s. Aside from, say, “Six Shot Morning,” Dopamine Chamber ultimately doesn’t employ its nostalgic genre signifiers to say anything meaningful about contemporary malaise.