Chosen by Monk
As the Uber Rock Singles Club enters its first full week of daily picks, today we are being prescribed a seriously heavy dose of ‘Serotonin’ by Stockholm post-hardcore alt-rock trio Normandie with the latest script to be issued advance of their forthcoming concept album, ‘Dopamine’.
Set in a dystopian not-too-distant and – crucially – not-at-all-unrealistic future, Normandie’s fourth album, finds the band asking two unsettling questions: what if we pushed our brains and bodies far beyond their limits? And what if we already are?
“Why do we do it to ourselves? Wholeheartedly, we surrender to our feelings without knowing if it’ll be mutual,” shares frontman Philip Strand. “The hard truth is most of our relationships during our lifetime are doomed to fail – yet still we do it,”
On ‘Dopamine’, Strand and band mates Håkan Almbladh (guitar) and Anton Franzon (drums) tackle the overstimulation of modern life head-on, and answer some hefty questions with some even bigger songs to produce a devastating, clinical example of everything a modern rock band should be.
“The whole album is about the chase for different highs and natural chemicals: oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline…” starts Philip.
“What if dopamine had to be clinically provided because we’ve burned through our receptors?
“Making this album futuristic and dystopian came very naturally when we started discussing the current state of the world. We’re all on overdrive. We’re upping the stakes all the time, and everybody has a higher tolerance now for stress in a way that nobody saw coming,”he explains.
“Back in the old days you were sowing potatoes and that was your one goal for the day – we were hunter-gatherers and we were just there to provide for our families. Today, we have so many things going on. We’re taught to chase our dreams, but chasing something in the future means you might miss the moment.”
‘Dopamine’ chronicles a different type of disorder to the band’s previous album, 2021’s ‘Beautiful And Dark Secrets’, which took a deep, dark dive into Strand’s religious upbringing and its aftereffects. This time around, the band looked around at their present, and imagined what a fictional, hellish future might look like, rather than dwelling on the past. In this future, swathes of society have burned out their neurotransmitters and have to take their dopamine in the same way we do today with caffeine, like that hit of morning coffee that makes you feel human again. But this time, dopamine isn’t used as a stimulant. It’s just what we take to get through the day.
Welcome to the Dopamine Clinic. Your prescription is ready for collection.
- ‘Dopamine‘ is released this Friday (9 November).
- Normandie kick off their latest tour on Saturday (10 November):
