Ever at the cutting edge and ever more flashy, the new album from the French rapper Jules Abecassis, known as Jwles, is all about grandiosity.
For more than a decade—kicking off with the Americanophile Du Purusha in 2015—Jules Abecassis, aka Jwles, tirelessly refines the mechanics of what he told us was his “luxury music.” A Paris native who grew up between Grasse and the United States, yet fascinated by “Chinese money” and “Russian money” (Russe), it is, however, as a Swiss master jeweller and grand clockmaker that one imagines the cosmopolitan Jwles on his latest record, bearing a title as unmistakably French as can be: Putain.
Right from the outset, Bling-Bling, all of Jwles’s formal obsessions—comparable to a Swiss timepiece—are laid bare: his gaudy taste for luxury that spills across premium productions, but above all his compulsive fixation on precision. The precision extends to the subgenres of US rap he samples (plugg, jersey, Detroit beats, revival crunk…), to the hypnotic-mathematical rhythm of the DMV flow (the technique of stacking punchlines one by one), and to his French-flavoured writing that brings forth a vision so potent that it sets him apart from the American rappers he rubs shoulders with. Having recently collaborated with American-Ethiopian rapper Sideshow before the release of a debut album destined to be remembered (Tigray Funk, 2026), Jwles never shies away from the task of crafting music that sits at the cutting edge.
A Mathematical Mystic
A remarkable selector of productions (here assembled by Timothée Joly and mastered by the indefatigable Alex Gopher) as radical as they are evident, the feverish rapper amplifies the hallucinatory potential of his trailing flow. In this “putain” whispered ad nauseam until it drains of life, in the motifs echoing the epiphores of the drill-er Freeze Corleone or in his tongue-twisting mechanical metre and feigned detachment, P****N continually redefines its formula: a mathematical mysticism. Despite the apparent repetitiveness of the setup, Jwles always finds a trigger for stimulation: a bar landing on an unexpected beat, a jab at Julien Odoul, a sample evoking nu-soul—he confided in 2022 that he dreamed of a feature with Erykah Badu—or an entire dictionary of new idiomatic expressions, as striking as they are hilarious, that one might wish to have invented.
P****N (Le Zin Records/Demain/PIAS). Releases October 16. Live at La Cigale, Paris, on December 10.
