Balladur

It’s a fact: we’ve aged. Balladur is no longer the crazy pop irruption born of the French noise cauldron that struck everyone in the mid-’10s, no: the duo has been around, playing in every pit in the land, criss-crossing every département in 205, for better or for worse.

While the two daredevils still speak the language of beautiful songs and globalised borrowings, we’ve never heard an album from them as doomy as the one you’re about to hear.

The 9 tracks on ‘Pourquoi certains arbres sont si grands’ are haunted by a nostalgia for hopes and happy days, and a very unique taste of Quoibonist ashes. Is it that 70s Italian passion? Is it the staggering frontality of the text? The obsessive taste for chiaroscuro? The omnipresence of demonic synths in the background?

What’s curious is that it was as a ‘Cold Wave band’ that Balladur emerged in 2013. And it’s 10 years later, having shaken off all the pre-packaged labels, that they deliver their hardest, most inhabited and earth-shattering record yet.