This Friday, April 3, you’ll also find in stores the records by Turzi Gage and Yan Wagner.
Arlo Parks Ambiguous Desire (Transgressive Records/PIAS)
The British musician and poet guides us straight into the strobe-lit world, enriching her nu-soul with synthetic productions. At the dawn of the 2020s’ malaise, Arlo Parks opened her discography with a debut EP bearing a fittingly topical title: Super Sad Generation. Four tracks (including the hit Cola) that pulse with the mood of a disillusioned, concerned, and deeply unhappy youth. Seven years and two albums later, the British poet once again chronicles youth through Ambiguous Desire, a sun-drenched record that leads us straight into the lunar-lit strobes of a club. For while youth is sad, it still knows how to have fun, to desire, and to party. And so what if breakups sting when poetry remains to light the way.
By Louise Lucas. Read the review of Ambiguous Desire.
Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains Halage (InFiné/Bigwax)
Free as the air, lively as water, the captivating French composer allows himself to be carried by inspiring encounters to craft a fluctuating and tender album. Returning barely a year after his previous record, the splendid Âge fleuve (2025), Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains continues his pursuit of shifting sonorities, as fluid and powerful as a torrent. To shape his new intoxicating tracks, the Saintes-born artist found refuge in two places: the Château vert, where he wrote his demos during a residency, and the barge Adélaïde where Émile Papandréou of the group UTO lives, with whom he completed the project.
By Noémie Lecoq. Read the review of Halage.
Thundercat Distracted (Brainfeeder/PIAS)
An unstoppable sense of groove that weaves a vast, playful patchwork: Distracted reveals the Californian in all his facets. And if music has always been, for Thundercat, a means of inventing his own world, far from the adult world? The hypothesis takes root in the mid-2010s, when the American turned Twitter into a theatre of LOL, strapped on a lightsaber to accept his first Grammy, and announced his tour while simulating a sexual act with his Pokémon plush. Since then, Flying Lotus’s best friend has consistently placed amusement at the center of his albums, an endearing oddity that’s just enough to stay innovative without being weird, arousing curiosity rather than suspicion.
By Maxime Delcourt. Read the review of Distracted.
Turzi Gage Drop! (Record Makers)
The Franco-British duo Romain (Turzi) and Oliver (Gage) joined forces to produce galvanizing, feverish sounds. Friends for more than twenty years, highly active on the Paris underground scene, Romain Turzi and Oliver Gage, long settled in France and owner of Rock Bottles cellar, share a close musical rapport that had not yet fully materialized into a project. They had already crafted tracks together, but never gave form to a shared undertaking. Their artistic partnership finally sealed itself after a period of deep depression endured by Oliver Gage.
By Jérôme Provençal. Read the review of Drop!.
Yan Wagner Æther (Yotanka Records/PIAS)
The album opens with massive, heavy, hammering guitar riffs, sounding like a call to a pagan ceremony. From this opening invocation emerges a record that favors mutation over quotation. The solemnity of cold wave, the tension of industrial rock, the pop delicacy, and the electronic intoxication of the 1990s — between Étienne Daho, Depeche Mode of the Ultra era (1997) and the Big Beat impulses of the Chemical Brothers — surface, transfigured.
By Arnaud Ducome. Read the review of Æther.
