Introspection, rimes techniques, réflexions clairvoyantes : NeS profite de son premier album pour prouver qu’il sait tout faire. Y compris rapper comme s’il fredonnait un sample.
It seems clear that this is the true joy of rapping: playing with words, making each line sound like a vital impulse to utter truths, without ever letting the form overshadow the substance. Or vice versa.
With a certain sense of style, NeS has over the past few years proven he belongs to those rhyme-enthusiasts, to that school where the fundamentals of the New York scene are learned in one’s native tongue (Biggie, Jay-Z, Prodigy), where Booba’s early albums serve as dictionaries, where you rap, yes, but never at the expense of introspection or observations tinged with bitterness.
The Assertion of a Style
All that makes the strength of Des pieds et des mains was actually already in place for some time: the EPs La Course (2022), Ça va aller (2023) and Pour 2 vrai (2025) were certainly less sentimental, perhaps more linear in form, but they already gave the impression of facing an artist born to rap (“I rap like an old-timer / I’m not even twenty years old”), with ease, technique and flashes of brilliance.
“Prince Waly, Alpha Wann or Laylow didn’t blow up everything in a week.” This confession, voiced during a 2022 encounter, says a lot about the vision of this “urban knight”, who took the time to think this debut album through in the long run, across sessions held among the Abruzzo mountains (“Surrounded by mountains, I recharge”), Montreal, Paris and Zurich, where the album’s sole featuring—DMX, in a duo with Muddy Monk— was born.
Roaming the Melodies
For the rest, every track on Des pieds et des mains was crafted with the producer Lil Chick, whose evolving structures, rejecting obvious production ticS to welcome sounds inherited from jazz and orchestral music, push NeS to regularly adjust his delivery. Sometimes, when the rhythm intensifies, the voice goes off the rails (Le Bruit et le silence). Other times, it becomes softer, more narrative, when the melody calls for a lull (SSL).
The only constant: the agility with which the rapper from Val-de-Marne makes each beat his own to stay as close as possible to what he is telling— his family story (Mèrefils), his heartbreaks (Boomerang, Post-it), the paradoxes that forge an identity, the necessary moments of egotrip. Des pieds et des mains is thus many things at once. An intimate work, the assertion of a style, the expression of a popular ambition (“I don’t care about being the rapper of the rappers”), a life force, the collection of words and thoughts from a young rapper happy to accomplish with such mastery a double feat: “a debut album and a first therapy”.
Des pieds et des mains (Ninefour & Seeing Sounds). Release set for March 13.
