Thought of by the electronic producer Surkin and director Romain Gavras as an audiovisual work, “Love & Tears” is above all a galvanizing debut album, tightly organized around a formidable principle: fuse disorder and harmony in pop songs with immediate impact.
It’s almost become an obsession. Or at least a concern. At a moment when more than 100,000 tracks are uploaded daily, many musicians choose to plan each release with surgical care, afraid that their latest creation will be swallowed by the nonstop stream of new material. Surkin, for example. He has never been the type to sustain a constant streaming pace — only one genuine album in twenty years of career (USA, 2011) — yet the French producer pushes this quest for the ultimate gesture to the limit with Gener8ion, a project imagined ten years ago alongside Romain Gavras.
In the meantime, there was a hit – Neo Surf, with 070 Shake, perhaps the loveliest of 2021 –, the soundtrack to Athena, then nothing more. “I like doing research, trying dozens of versions of the same track, telling myself I don’t have the obligation to release everything I make,” explains the one who has also contributed to the albums of Adèle Castillon and Olivia Merilahti. “These ten years of waiting have ultimately been beneficial: I could see which ideas mattered most and how to sustain them over time.”
In Interaction with the Machines
The future, let’s talk about it. It is one of the major obsessions of Love & Tears, built around the same question: what remains of music as time passes? To answer it, Surkin revisited old songs — notably MC5’s Let Me Try — to understand their harmonic progression, their seemingly minimal structure, but also their capacity to appropriate the musical grammar of previous decades to subvert it.
God Hates Space, Heart Of Blue or Try, that’s exactly it: tracks that hold on two or three chords, that owe much to the repetitive principles of the music Surkin grew up with — hip-hop and electro — and that fit into a pop tradition, despite an analog instrumentation. “Even if many tracks were born at the guitar, the computer remains the place where everything takes shape. It’s not so much about sound as it is about interaction with the machines. I like the idea of creating error and unpredictability, avoiding that everything is neat or too rigid.”
The Taste for Contrasts
During the recording, another question arose: “What would a track by Elton John sound like if sung by a drunken hooligan at two in the morning?” From this reflection come Storm I and Storm II, a diptych perfectly embodied by a Yung Lean more than ever at ease in his costume of punk crooner, with that raw, primitive voice that constantly spirals off course. The opposite, in short, of the eponymous song, a delicately crafted ballad in which Yannis Philippakis (Foals) sings as rarely, in a falsetto of remarkable technical precision. “I want to create a contrast between the voices of my collaborators, what people expect from them and the energy assumed by the melody.”
A contrast reinforced by Romain Gavras’ clips, all highly stylized and endowed with substantial resources: here, Charlize Theron; there, a choreography by Damien Jalet. The impact, of course, is enormous — a month and a half after its release, Storm has racked up 14 million views — but one should not forget the album’s primary idea: to compose a “dystopia that relies less on a narrative plot and more on an emotional journey.”
Love & Tears (Iconoclast Music/Virgin Music Group/Universal). Release on June 12.
