Adèle Castillon

At 24, despite her disarmingly young age, which lends her brown eyes a bright, clear sparkle, Adèle Castillon has already lived several lives, imagined and real. Plenty of material, then, for the intimate lyrics of a debut album that candidly tells the story of a first breakup and the turmoil of emotional dependency and dependency more broadly. All delivered with the poetic authenticity and freshness that already made the songs of Vidéoclub irresistible: the electro-pop duo, steeped in an ’80s nostalgia—think Odezenne meets Elli et Jacno—that she formed in Nantes with Matthieu Reynaud when she was seventeen. […]

While she was still in high school, a first love, as intense as all first times, inspired her to form Vidéoclub with her boyfriend at the time. The video for « Amour plastique », put together with whatever resources they had and shared by a Mexican actor from a Netflix series, who made it go viral, brought them tens of millions of streams. A legend was born, culminating in a tour and a final video, « SMS », which wittily summed up three years of love and announced their breakup.

Someone other than Adèle Castillon might have lost their way. But she writes what comes next herself, quietly strong despite openly acknowledged vulnerabilities, with a bumpy journey reflected in the perfectly aligned title of this debut album. Signed to the music label of Iconoclast, the highly creative image-production company, she found an ideal partner in Surkin, an electro talent as precocious as she is, to chart a new musical horizon together. It combines the innocence of French pop with a homemade, uncompromising spirit, drawing on impeccable influences as varied as Adèle Castillon’s very Gen Z playlist, as well as Taxi Girl, Suicide, Billie Eilish, Madonna, Beach House, Tame Impala, Chromatics, Miley Cyrus, Daft Punk Lio, Damso, Muddy Monk, Mylène Farmer, and Agar Agar. The thrilling beginnings of a young artist who, we bet, will be one to watch in the months ahead.