"Tomorrow, we leave the city, We have to go through the forest, to get to the other side."
This is a portrait of young women in a world on fire. A love story unfolding against troubled currents. Desire burning at the heart of chaos. This is De l’autre côté ("On the other side"), Laura Cahen's new album.
After a childhood spent studying piano, violin, guitar and singing in Nancy, northeast France, Laura Cahen was ready for a life of stage and studio. She set off with Nord (2017), a debut album recorded with Samy Osta, then followed up with Une fille (2021), created alongside producer Dan Levy (of The Dø fame). An intensely intimate, minimalistic record with electronic hints, that spurred Laura onto a nationwide tour and a collaborative EP (Des filles).
After a successful show at Paris' Le Trianon in February 2023, Laura began writing songs for a new album that blended together anglo-saxon musical references with her love for the French language. She thus crossed the Channel to 'the other side' and found refuge in the musical town of Margate. Specifically, inside Tunng & LUMP co-founder Mike Lindsay's seaside studio, a welcoming shrine for synths, samplers, mellotrons and other vintage machine drums.
Also essential to the album's making was Josephine Stephenson, a brilliant French-British composer and multi-instrumentalist, whose credits include collaborations with Damon Albarn, Arctic Monkeys and Daughter. She co-composed the songs with Laura, performed backing vocals, synths, flutes, and wrote the string arrangements performed by leading London orchestra 12 Ensemble (who have worked with artists such as Nick Cave, Jonny Greenwood and Max Richter).
The three of them worked at crafting Laura's initial raw substance into cristalline, even translucent, 70s-leaning pop, assisted by superb drumming from Zoé Hochberg (Astral Bakers, Hyphen Hyphen, Pomme). 'We decided to exclusively use physical instruments', confides Laura, 'organic ones, analogue synthesisers and keyboards, tape machines, according to my idea of what the "English sound" is, in search for either timelessness or over-the-top retro-futurism, similar to what Laurie Anderson achieved years ago with Big Science'. The album's referential realm extends further, summoning Joni Mitchell, Steve Reich, Os Mutantes, Big Thief, Linda Perhacs, Laura Marling as well as French heroes Brigitte Fontaine and Anne Sylvestre. An overwhelmingly female cast, no surprise for the keen admirer of Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf and Goliarda Sapienza that is Laura, whose favourite subjects are here fully fledged: women 'in life and in the world', environmental issues, homosexuality and equal rights for all.
Laura sings softly of her childhood, her fears from the past and hopes for tomorrow. 'De l'autre côté is a journey', she reflects. 'I imagined a world not too far from ours, burning from all sides, in which bombs fall continuously, climate crisis is at its peak and governments are more conservative and oppressive than ever. In this world, two women fall madly in love and must leave the city in search for a place where their love could have a chance to prosper.' A flight for freedom. The emergence of passion and the obstacle course that follows form the narrative thread for these ten distinctly poetic songs. Faithful to Laura's cinematic paradigm, they successively conjure up Lars Von Trier's apocalyptic Melancholia, Georgia Oakley's hindered queer romance Blue Jean, Thelma & Louise's high-speed chase and the space-time odyssey that is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Laura also cites Jane Campion, Kelly Reichardt and Paul Thomas Anderson as references, as well as Adam McKay's Don't Look Up, which recently caught her attention.
The album warns against the threats to 'the beauty of the simple world', which Laura celebrates at every turn with sharp, straightforward lyrics conveying raw emotion through masterful, almost whisper-like vocal delivery. When Laura sings 'I', the subject is not only her but all women, equally protagonists of this delicate dystopia. She raises ethical issues such as transhumanism or the chasm between climate activists and skeptics… without denying the solutions offered by technology. The video for superb album opener "Fusées" ('Rockets') was indeed created using artificial intelligence, but carefully preserves its human substance.
Love, however, remains at the heart of Laura's lyrics, such as on "Les Astres" ('The Stars'), a song about love at first sight. 'It reduces us to tension, desire, concern and excitement all at the same time', she tells us. 'There's something magical and inexplicable in that rare phenomenon, it is larger than us, metaphysical and mystical, putting everything else into question, even the ages of Venus or Earth.'
De l'autre côté thus conjures up stellar folk pop, from the superb "Les Astres" to the elevated "Partout" (which features longtime musical partner Theodora on bass), via the Au Revoir Simone-like keyboard stylings of "Quitter La Ville", the electronic pulsations of "Les Ombres", the Beatlesian soundscapes of "Nulle Part" or the tender piano of "La Maison", on which Laura confesses : 'I'm still just as scared of the dark'. The vocals on album closer "Puisque tu pars" soar above string waves, like the seagulls that ultimately appear. Laura Cahen never turns down a path — on the contrary, she invites us to cross with her to the other side, whether it be of the Channel, a lover's heart, life or the mirror.