‘Where Is Gone?’ makes ROSALÍA the first guest voice on a Fontaines D.C. record

Fontaines D.C. have never let another singer onto one of their records, and the first exception is ROSALÍA. “Where Is Gone?”, the third single from the Dublin band’s fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, is a slow duet in which Grian Chatten and the Catalan singer trade verses before meeting on the chorus, his voice low and hers rising above it.

The pairing makes sense on paper because both acts built their names on refusing to sand down where they come from. Fontaines D.C. grounded their post-punk in Dublin accents and Irish poetry; ROSALÍA carried flamenco into pop and electronic production without losing its spine. Guitarist Carlos O’Connell, who grew up in Madrid, drew that line himself: “What really excited me was how she was keeping a Spanish tradition of music alive,” he said, adding that it “in a spiritual way felt akin to what we’ve tried to do with Irish music.”

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What the song is not is a flamenco fusion. Both sing in English, and the arrangement leans on weeping strings and a slow build that Stereogum called “a big, dramatic, string-laden ballad with real Bond-theme vibes,” hearing in its orchestral swells some echo of ROSALÍA’s most recent album, LUX. The lyrics, as Consequence read them, follow a romance coming apart.

It is also a sharp turn from the singles that came before it. “Marianne” opened the campaign and the darker “Tongue” followed; NME wrote that “Where Is Gone?” takes on “a much more elegant, theatrical sound.” Chatten has framed the whole record as an experiment on the listener: “The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” he said. “You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.”

The rollout has not been clean. The track leaked over the weekend before its official release, after copies circulated on white-label seven-inch singles at album listening events. And one duet says little about whether an eleven-track album its singer says “needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning” holds together. Listeners drawn in by ROSALÍA’s name will find her on a single song, eighth on the tracklist.

O’Connell has been open about the fandom behind the invitation. He said he has been a fan of ROSALÍA “since her debut album, which was absolutely beautiful,” and called her “an artist who’s blown me away at every stage since.” The curiosity is measurable already: the audio on the band’s official YouTube channel passed 180,000 views within days, a quick start for a slow ballad from a guitar band.

Dopamine Chamber, the follow-up to the band’s 2024 album Romance, arrives on Friday, October 16, via XL Recordings. The single came out on October 12, almost a month after the band revealed the feature alongside the tracklist on September 17. A small Roundhouse show in London on October 15 raises money for the mental-health charity CALM, before an arena tour that reaches Lisbon on October 21, Madrid on October 22 and Barcelona on October 24, and ends its UK run at The O2 on November 27.

Dates in Japan, Australia and New Zealand follow early in 2027, with North American legs in the spring and autumn. No Latin American shows have been announced, and there is no word yet on whether ROSALÍA will join the band on any of them.

Tags: Rosalía, indie rock, post-punk, Dopamine Chamber, Fontaines D.C., Grian Chatten

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