Once scrappy post-punk poets, they’re now one of the biggest bands in the world. As they release new album Dopamine Chamber, fans including Kneecap and Shame explain their sensational rise

When Irish rockers Fontaines DC emerged in 2019, they were a bunch of post-punk poets making abrasive guitar music at a time when Dance Monkey, Drake and The Greatest Showman reigned supreme. But today, as their fifth album Dopamine Chamber is released, the quintet are looking towards a 2027 filled with gigs in UK stadiums, US arenas and headline slots at big European festivals – plus rumours of topping Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. It’s quite a trajectory.

Their rise has been strangely traditional for a time when social media has culture in a chokehold. Ever more ambitious albums, the support of radio and institutions such as the BBC, and a lot of touring have all played parts. Beyond that, “fact is, they’re one of the best bands in the world,” says fellow countryman Mo Chara, one third of Kneecap.

„Die Toten Hosen“ füllen auf ihrer Abschiedstour in Argentinien eine 15 000-Plätze-Arena. Wieso haben die Punkrocker gerade hier so wahnsinnig viele Fans? Ein Konzertbesuch.

Drawing from post-hardcore, twee and emo, the Exeter trio’s intoxicating energy feels like an invitation to form your own band

From Exeter, UK
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Up next Little Bastard EP out now

It’s tempting to view any half-decent scene as either a magical happening or a simple quirk of geography and timing. In reality, they’re more like monuments to the importance of showing up. For that to continue to happen, you need bands like Pushbike. Rattling through four songs in well under 10 minutes, each crooked hook, euphoric yelp and cheesewire guitar lead on their Little Bastard EP feels like an invitation to form a band, draw a flyer, or book a show.

Whether on the frontline in Ukraine or skate parks in Soweto, the genre is still a vital outlet for disaffected people everywhere. Here, musicians explain how they rage against the machine

Andriy Zholob, vocalist/guitarist, Beton: When MTV arrived in Ukraine, I heard Nirvana, the Offspring, Bad Brains, Social Distortion and thrash metal, and realised that all this started from punk rock. Our drummer and I were in a ska-punk band first, but when our vocalist became pregnant we started Beton in 2017 and played lots of festivals.

Ahead of the Irish alt-rockers’ highly anticipated fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, we count down their potent, occasionally political, catalogue

A single inspired by the birth of bassist Conor Deegan’s daughter, It’s Amazing to Be Young is a lovely example of Fontaines DC operating in euphoric mode, a relatively recent addition to their emotional mood board: “Sometimes,” offered frontman Grian Chatten, “optimism is a necessary delusion.”

The Celtic punk band’s co-founders Spider Stacy and James Fearnley take your questions about Shane MacGowan, ruffling the feathers of trad musicians and putting Laurence Fox in his place

The Pogues earned a reputation early on as a ferocious live band. What does it feel like to be in the middle of that whirlwind? VerulamiumParkRanger
Spider Stacy [co-founder, tin whistle, vocals]: Last Christmas, we did a secret gig in a pub in Nunhead [in London] and it reminded me of those early days when we were so close to the audience, who were practically on top of each other. The venue that most sticks in my mind is the Hope & Anchor [in Islington, London]. We played there to about 35 people [in 1983], but when we went back a month later the match had been struck and it was absolutely roaring. After that, at gigs, there were clothes landing on stage …

James Fearnley [co-founder, accordion]: Medical equipment, crutches …

A selection of winners and notable finalists in the awards celebrating the art of music photography, which saw 24,500 images submitted from 42 countries

(Rough Trade)
Your favourite band’s favourite band unleash a thrilling and relentless 42 minutes of monstrous noise whose precise instrumental source always remains discomfitingly unclear

Gilla Band have attracted some impressive plaudits since announcing their fourth album this summer. A feature in Pitchfork heralding its arrival described them as “Ireland’s most influential band since My Bloody Valentine”. Should any readers feel this was a classic example of music journalism hyperbole, it was followed up with a succession of quotes from the Dublin quartet’s musical peers, all eager to attest to their importance, originality and impact. One of them, Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez – one half of Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls – went so far as to say precisely the kind of thing about Gilla Band that people said about My Bloody Valentine 35 years ago: “They basically reinvented guitar music.”

Under the circumstances, there’s something faintly disappointing about the fact that Pugnello opens with a very prosaic and familiar sound indeed: that of someone striking a power chord on a distorted electric guitar. But then something disconcertingly odd happens. The power chord doesn’t fade away. It just … keeps going, for the best part of two and half minutes. That grinding drone underpins a track called The Angelus, punctuated by frantic bursts of warp-speed rhythm that would sound like drum’n’bass breakbeats were it not for the fact that they appear to be played live on a drum kit consisting entirely of snares. The drone is eventually replaced by a series of ferocious, shuddering bass explosions, overlaid with a sound that could, theoretically, be feedback, but most evokes a dial-up modem.

Their debut stormed the charts and wowed Iggy Pop, but health crises threatened to derail the Brighton duo. Now they’re back, taking aim at the manosphere, fascism and the ruling class

At a last-minute surprise show in London, the British punk duo Lambrini Girls are sharing their stage with a continuous tide of crowd surfers. They move almost as one, a jumble of limbs rippling over a sea of bodies – emboldened, perhaps, by the band’s vow to double up as security guards. “If you don’t feel safe, tell us and we’ll punch them in the dick!” shouts Phoebe Lunny, the lead vocalist and guitarist.

She also requests that people pick up anyone who falls over in the moshpit and goes around with the mic asking fans to introduce themselves if they are “queer legends” (there are many). “This show is as much yours as it is ours,” Lunny announces, before she and the bassist Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez pummel everyone with shouty rants, furious beats and sludgy grunge.

Glen Matlock, Viv Albertine and Rat Scabies revisit the music, clothes and disgusting spitting in a likable documentary marking half a century of British punk

As the majority of them ease into their eighth decade, the overlords of British punk rock get yet another celebratory runout, gently reheating material that has become familiar over the years but never loses its appeal. A subculture that passed almost immediately from tabloid-triggering menace to picture-postcard caricature, punk may have passed into legend as a joyless and even squalid diversion in music and fashion history, but its surviving spokespeople recall their participation in it all with no little enthusiasm, even if they’ve clearly said it a thousand times already. No doubt it is the gen alphas among us who will benefit most; you’d expect their jaws to drop and eyes to roll at some of the stuff deemed perfectly acceptable in the late 1970s: women’s-breasts T-shirts, amateurish pancake makeup, and all that disgusting spitting. (“I didn’t mind it going in my mouth,” says the Damned’s Captain Sensible at one point, out-disgusting everyone.)

There’s a good spread of voices on offer; at least one member of most of the era’s big acts puts in an appearance with Glen Matlock (the Sex Pistols), Rat Scabies (the Damned), Terry Chimes (the Clash), Steve Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees), and Hugh Cornwell (the Stranglers) leading the way. (The latter, though affable enough, is easily the least impressed as to punk’s actual achievements, which is a valuable corrective.) The original punk wave had little space for women (despite the sense that blows were being struck for equality) and that’s the case in the film as well: Gaye Advert (the Adverts) and Viv Albertine (the Slits) get a bit of time on camera though inevitably get a bit lost in it all. Due recognition, however, is paid to designer Vivienne Westwood as punk’s true founding spirit; Sex, the King’s Road boutique she ran with Malcolm McLaren, was a crucible of the British punk scene. Don Boyd, who produced the Pistols’ movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle along with the late Jeremy Thomas, says she “was punk and is punk … it came from her”.

Featuring Tom Morello, Chuck D and Idles’ Joe Talbot, the rapper’s new project celebrates the shared ideals of punk and hip-hop – ‘both the voice of the voiceless’

Adam Briggs has never been one for subtlety – in his lyrics, his punchlines or his activism. In person, the man has a huge presence. He speaks with deliberation, his voice resonating even without a microphone. Whether in front of a crowd of 80,000 or eight people, Briggs is comfortable being the focus.

“I can’t hide,” he says. Not that he wants to.

As he releases a tell-all book, the Punk magazine founder and self-described ‘fuck-up’ holds forth on 1970s excess, the American roots of punk and why the Beatles are ‘stupid’

Legs McNeil vividly remembers the reaction he got from the original CBGB bands in 1975 when they heard the name of the magazine he co-founded: Punk, the first publication ever dedicated to the form. “Absolutely no one wanted to be called a punk back then,” he said. “Not even the Ramones. Johnny Ramone demanded that we cross out every reference to punk in an article about them.”

Flash forward a few years and, “suddenly everybody wanted to be called a punk!” McNeil said. “The Ramones started running around telling everyone, ‘you know, we were the first punk band!’”

The Vancouver band earned a cult fandom for their uncompromising gigs. As they ready their brutal debut album, they discuss subverting audience expectations and the nightly toll of excavating trauma onstage

You’d be hard pressed to find a band with fewer airs and graces than Piss. First, there’s the unavoidable matter of their name, which they style in all caps, no nonsense; a word that scans as vulgar and combative but also somewhat facetious when displayed on their merch in loopy cursive, sometimes decorated with bows. The Vancouver quartet’s music is a merciless cyclone of hardcore, poetry, sound collage and performance art that revolves entirely around singer Taylor Zantingh’s experiences with sexual violence.

On stage at Eindhoven’s Hit the City festival in late August, the band greets the stacked crowd with a trigger warning before drummer Garreth Roberts, bassist Gavin Moya and guitarist Tyler Paterson launch into pulverising fits of noise-punk, broken up by audio samples of children laughing and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin talking about pornography. Zantingh hurls herself around, clutching at her stomach and flinging her pigtails before winding down to a nervous, twitching standstill. The intense set is finely tuned to present a narrative of gender-based violence not as entertainment, but as lived experience. They play it exactly the same every night, and have done for the last two years.

‘Joey didn’t surf. And he didn’t like this photo. He said, “You made my legs look thin.” Like it was my fault he had skinny legs’

The first band I ever saw were the Beatles, on 19 August 1964 at the Cow Palace Arena near San Francisco. I was 13. I remember every 29 minutes of it: 17,000 screaming girls making a deafening din and thousands of flashbulbs going off at once, lighting up the entire stadium. I’d been a Beatlemaniac since seeing a clip of them at the London Palladium on the Jack Paar show, then live on the Ed Sullivan show. I bought magazines with them in and wondered what kind of person took the photographs. So my first forays into photography were taking photographs of photographs of the Beatles with the primitive family Kodak.

When I was 15 I took a very basic photography class, but later, after three years of college, I dropped out, sold my Nikon and went to England. I started dating Ian Dury, then after we broke up, a friend gave me a one-way ticket to New York where I started going out with Richard Hell, whose band Television played CBGBs every Sunday night. Richard and I split up on good terms, and he asked me to take pictures of him. My first was the famous fake blood photo of the Heartbreakers, the band he formed with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan from the New York Dolls. Richard suggested captioning the poster “Catch them while they’re still alive” because they had a nefarious reputation.

Irish noisemongers Gilla Band, shadowy producers Two Shell and lovable band the Big Moon have new records, and there are tours from Bob Dylan and Kelela – plus the best of jazz, global and classical

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• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

First-wave punks rejected religion – but come the 90s, bands embracing eastern thought found legions of devotees. Ahead of reformations and reissues, they discuss the Bhagavad Gita, brawls and tulasi beads in the pit

Whether wielded as shock tactic or part of a considered philosophical stance, mockery and distrust of religion have been baked into punk rock’s DNA from the get-go. The Damned, Crass, the Germs and the Dead Kennedys all proffered early potshots and takedowns, and if Bad Brains received a grudging pass for their Rastafari leanings, in general, songs kowtowing to gods or masters were about as likely to win you scene cred as praise for Reagan, cops or nuclear war.

As the 80s ticked into the 90s, however, something curious began to happen: a clutch of bands emerged who were wise to the hardcore classicism of Minor Threat and SSD but also looked east to Krishna consciousness. Leading the way was Ray “Raghunath” Cappo who, barely into his 20s, had already broken down walls as frontman for Youth of Today, a New York band who combined a straight-edge philosophy with animal-rights advocacy and a sense of full-throated positivity. He and guitarist John Porcelly had “witnessed enough young people screwing up their lives that we thought, as simple as it is, it’s a positive message. Let’s rally behind it,” he says. “And it became big, bigger than we expected.”

Alongside Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer created a feminist punk vernacular that’s still inspiring the likes of Olivia Rodrigo. They recall the clarity and conviction of their historic teenage exploits

Back in June, a cut-and-paste photocopied flyer began appearing on telegraph poles around Portland, Oregon, promoting a DIY show by an apparently defunct band at an intimate community space. The band hadn’t mentioned it online, but hopeful fans bought every ticket anyway. Their bet paid off: the gig really was the first in 32 years for Heavens to Betsy, the pioneering feminist punk duo of drummer Tracy Sawyer and singer-guitarist Corin Tucker – the latter’s band before Sleater-Kinney unleashed her visceral vibrato unto the world. Tucker proudly made the flyer herself.

Heavens to Betsy were barely out of high school when they played their very first show, 35 years ago this week, in Olympia, Washington, a two-song set as part of a now-mythical indie fest dubbed the International Pop Underground Convention. The festival also featured the likes of Fugazi, Bikini Kill and Melvins; meanwhile Heavens to Betsy had practised only a couple times. Before an audience of about 100, Sawyer was so terrified that all she could think was, “This has to be over soon.”

The maverick former Public Image Ltd bassist takes us on a typically picaresque journey through his ‘Kafka-esque’ days at Transport for London, being named by Sid Vicious and his spiritual learnings

Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. “They’ll say: ‘Are you Jah Wobble?’” recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he’s working on anything. “And I like to say: ‘Yes, I’m recording an album. I’m doing it right now.’”

In the 2020s, the 68-year-old bassist and bandleader has been revisiting the city of his birth and youth, composing and producing albums including the cosmic dub of The Bus Routes of South London, or the celestial electronica of Thames Symphony, while traversing London on public transport.

Koller, who co-founded the celebrated band in 1986, had been battling cancer of the esophagus

Lou Koller, the singer and co-founder of New York hardcore band Sick of It All, has died after a battle with cancer, his bandmates announced. Koller was 59.

In a social media post on the band’s Instagram page, a statement paid tribute to Koller and his work and said: “The level of loss that we feel at this time is overwhelming.”

Five decades since punk bible Sniffin’ Glue, DIY magazines are in rude, rich health. Their creators talk fandom, community-building and resisting the algorithm

‘The most important part of the word ‘fanzine’ is ‘fan’,” says London-based zine-maker Jon Marsh. Existing outside mainstream media, free from the demands of release cycles and search engine optimisation, music fanzines are obsessions turned into tangible objects; self-published primarily for the maker’s own enjoyment, but with the potential of forging connections with like-minded people.

In the 1970s, punk zines such as Sniffin’ Glue, Alternative Ulster and Ripped & Torn allowed fans to share news and enthusiasm quickly and cheaply. Half a century on, music fanzines are enjoying a resurgence as a form of resistance to algorithm fatigue and the hyper-capitalist music industry. “Digital attention span is at an all-time low,” says hip-hop musician ExP, creator of the West Yorkshire Hip-Hop zine. “You’re almost definitely going to spend more time looking at a zine than anything you see scrolling. It’s more interesting and more real.” In the words of Stephen McRobbie, from indie-pop icons and fanzine regulars the Pastels: “It’s the long way round compared to other media, but the scenery is always better.”