The Franco-American artist condenses guitars and electronic pulsations to forge a dark, visceral atmosphere.
The album opens with massive, heavy, hammering guitar riffs, as if summoning a pagan rite. From this initial invocation emerges a record that favors transformation over quotation. The gravity of cold wave, the tension of industrial rock, the delicate essence of pop and the electronic intoxication of the 1990s—ranging from Étienne Daho to Depeche Mode during the Ultra era (1997) and the Big Beat impulses of the Chemical Brothers—surface there, transfigured.
For Yan Wagner, the past is used to create tension, never to breed nostalgia. On High, his nocturnal crooner voice brushes against a nerve-driven production, while Synchronised pushes the drama further: from a solemn orchestral canticle to a distorted drum’n’bass climax, the track becomes the lament of a digital lover in a world that is hyper-synced.
Letting machine and flesh converse
A moment of suspension arrives with the single Æthernité, a hypnotic duo with Malik Djoudi, while Here We Go Again unfurls magnetic rock, perpetually tense. If English, as on the other duo with Meryem Aboulouafa (60fps), returns to being the dominant language after his previous album, Couleur chaos (2021), Yan Wagner keeps French breathes (Æthernité, Miami) that amplify the album’s emotional charge.
Powerful and engaging, Æther confirms its author as a modern alchemist, capable of making machine and flesh converse, the heritage and the urgency of the moment speak to one another.
Æther (Yotanka Records/PIAS). Release on April 3. Live in concert at La Maroquinerie, Paris, on June 17.
