Valérie Leulliot and Sébastien Lafargue re-emerge with the same talent and elegance, delivering an album where nothing overflows and everything breathes.
“I come back and I do not know/What brings us back to the edge/We have already seen the sea claim some bodies/That we had said were missing”, sang Valérie Leulliot on Je reviens, the opening splendid of Faux mouvement (2000). A line that echoes today as a troubling, almost prophetic refrain. Eleven years after Ta lumière particulière, Autour de Lucie reappears with a sixth album faithful to this chiaroscuro pop crafted since the 1990s.
Centered around the tandem Valérie Leulliot and Sébastien Lafargue, the record advances with a hushed, precise veiling. The hypnotic single Quelque part opens with a homage to the absent, sustained by a hypnotic loop; Mes raisons scrutinizes missed meetings without pathos, while Mars 85 makes nostalgia dance along the edge of razor-sharp guitars. Always this manner of holding emotion at a distance without ever cooling it.
On Pas dansé, a kinship surfaces with a descendant of Autour de Lucie, Clara Luciani: the same delicate flow, the same melodic elegance, the same tension between gloom and light.
Musically, Hors monde weaves a delicate balance between electronic textures, chiselled guitars and the elegance of the singing. Nothing overruns, everything breathes. Valérie Leulliot’s voice, intact, does the rest: she threads these nine tracks like a sensitive thread, linking past and present. No revolution here, but a precious continuity – a way to come back with grace and simply remind that they were never really gone.
Hors monde (Microcultures/L’Autre Distribution). Released since May 22.
