After his college-era, French-language tale-song project, the former leader of Wall of Death dives into folktronica, all still in his mother tongue.
Gabriel Auguste has a singular trajectory, once known as the frontman of the psychedelic trio Wall of Death during the 2010s, before executing a 180-degree artistic turn in the year of lockdown, releasing electronic-pop tunes including the addictive single Tu danses — as if the songwriter were discovering the dance floor.
Behind his Viking-bearing, the bearded and tattooed giant loves nothing more than writing and composing in his wooded Paris studio, Woodland Records (which is also a label and a living workshop), dreaming of Alpine landscapes.
After the synthetic EP Coups bas (2020) and the collegial album La Grande Gomme (2024), where he invited Lescop, Dominique A, Alain Chamfort, P.R2B, Hubert Lenoir and Calypso Valois, Gabriel Auguste returns with the programmatic Earthly Paradise, an album illustrated by snow-capped peaks (a photo taken after a night spent bivouacking by the artist, who also paints watercolors in his spare time).
From the outset, he sings “a cloud of stars” and “a rain of crystal” in this grand opening (Stellar Mountain) that perfectly encapsulates the album’s folktronica leanings: arpeggiator, folk guitar, mellotron, vocoder and cello.
He prefers to talk of “folk robot,” but it is mainly that Gabriel Auguste refuses to choose between Neil Young and Tangerine Dream, Waylon Jennings and Silver Apples. Between two journeys into the Mont-Blanc massif or the Pyrenees, Gabriel Auguste sets his mountain trekking to music: “Here, I race down the abyss / Light as a reed” […] “I fly from pass to pass / Amid the Caresses of Aeolus,” he exclaims with his vocoded voice, as if in an Air album.
Constantly drawn by the Earthly Paradise that the mountains represent for him, the singer-alpinist draws inspiration from these “almost metaphysical pilgrimages” that allow him to feel exactly in his element (Le Vent, not without evoking Sébastien Tellier’s The Ritournelle, Manteau de neige, Toute puissante). Regaining a splendid footing with the folktronica current of the late 1990s, Gabriel Auguste thus grants himself a new ascent in his discography.
(Woodland Records/Diggers Factory). Released June 5. On tour at Nouveau Casino, Paris, June 11.
