Fifteen years after she started recording the sounds of her family life, Camille brings forth The Sound of Milk, a lush triptych rooted in empirical pop yet also meticulously crafted.
Sound and milk. A vast and peculiar program that marks Camille’s sixth album, which took almost a decade and a half to reach its final form. It is the span needed to watch children grow, and the songs with them. The Sound of Milk unfolds in three stages: Birth, Childhood, and Adolescence, a strange odyssey that is at once familial and musical, where the intimate becomes material for sound.
Once upon a time, then, there was a house, inhabited by tiny beings. No instrumentation beyond voices, household noises, church bells, laughter, English gospel. One merely needs a “stinky sock” and one slips into experimentation (art)pop. A spontaneity that calls to mind Sibylle Baier, the German musician whose folk pieces, home-made in the 1970s without any publication intention, would be discovered only much later. “The Birth songs weren’t premeditated, but I recorded them because I am a woman of today and I wanted to share them,” Camille declares.
A protean manifesto
When the babies have grown into children, Birth gives way to Childhood, which resumes the embryonic shapes of its predecessor, now framed by the vocal bass of her partner Clément Ducol and the cello of Pierre-François Dufour. Under the influence of The Sound of Music, a “pocket musical” where folk, swing, soul, jazz, French nursery rhymes and nursery rhymes in English jostle one another. “I still love watching the act of music in the history of music,” the singer explains, still with the same sense of wonder.
Yet behind this crafted whimsy lies the manifesto of an artist who refuses to separate her creative journey from her family life, affirming a happiness envisioned as an “ultimate act of resistance” against a darkening horizon. The quasi-carnal organic texture of Birth is followed by Childhood with its woody harmonies, and then Camille offers perhaps her most punchy proposition in a long time: Adolescence. Synths, breaths, pulsating beats… This protean pop, created with her partner and their children, reimagines certain melodies from the first two parts. One hears the Hollywoodesque journey of Emilia Perez (in Le Voyage), the care required to attend to what surrounds us (La Terre), the joy of transmission (Belle), the refusal to let the final word belong to a domineering patriarchy (She’s a Woman) or to a system that hardens landscapes as well as imaginations (GTB). All this, as Camille sings, makes one “smile at the angels”, against all odds.
The Sound Of Milk (Because). Released on September 18. A concert at the Olympia, Paris, from February 1 to 3, 2027.
