This Friday, May 8, you can also find in stores the albums by Broken Social Scene and The Haunted Youth.
Aldous Harding Train on the Island (4AD/Wagram)
The New Zealand artist continues to develop her pointillist universe in its barest form. And she achieves the feat of sounding elsewhere while staying close to us. Nine or ten tracks with no frills, arranged to form an album that is almost traditionally pop, and Aldous Harding never needs more to conjure her magic. This art of stripping down — almost pointillist — which she has translated, in turn, to the anxiety intrinsic to Southern Gothic, to the counter-cultural reveries under Laurel Canyon influence, or to the golden age of New York avant-garde, is more than a mere expression of nostalgia for the last century.
By Théo Dubreuil. Read the review of Train on the Island.
Broken Social Scene Remember the Humans (City Slang/Arts & Crafts/PIAS)
After nine years of silence, the Canadian collective returns with a fanciful collection, still rooted in indie pop and experimentation. A kaleidoscopic music could not come from a single brain. From the start, Broken Social Scene benefits from the unbridled imagination of its many members, whose list is as long as an arm — notably Leslie Feist, present on this new album, and Emily Haines, lead singer of Metric.
By Noémie Lecoq. Read the review of Remember the Humans.
The Haunted Youth Boys Cry Too (PIAS)
To follow Dawn of the Freak, Joachim Liebens’ project adopts a more direct approach to deliver a flood of emotion. A dizzying scream brings a eight-minute track, In My Head, to a high-tension close, signaling a shift: The Haunted Youth has shifted toward fury. While the Belgian Joachim Liebens’ project retains the dark pop vein of Dawn of the Freak, his first album released in 2022, Boys Cry Too is much more upfront.
By Juliette Poulain. Read the review of Boys Cry Too.
The Lemon Twigs Look For Your Mind! (Captured Tracks/Modulor)
The D’Addario brothers are back with another batch of generous pop songs steeped in a wide array of influences. Each time, it’s the same story: with every release by the two Long Island siblings, the hunt for inspirations and their cataloging kicks into high gear again, a rite of passage before launching the conversation, a prerequisite for opening debates. A habit that never fails to please critics and delight fans, not to mention purists who swell the ranks on both sides.
By Valentin Gény. Read the review of Look For Your Mind!
Lykke Li The Afterparty (Neon Gold Records/Virgin Records/Universal)
It’s astonishing what the mind can do when the heart beating fast, when the night promises to be unique and the bodies are too electrified to sleep. One feels that the opportunity is almost too good, a moment to surrender to one’s most hedonistic thoughts, without rejecting those that rarely have a place in contemporary societies: being vulnerable, gnawed by despair or overwhelmed by overwhelming emotions is no longer embarrassing. Four years after a minimalist Eyeye, the Swedish artist Lykke Li enriches her electro-pop with lush, sweeping orchestrations that express joy and desolation, euphoria and fear for the future.
By Maxime Delcourt. Read the review of The Afterparty.
