Astral Bakers - The Whole Story (2024) [Hi-Res]

This is a tale of inevitability. Of four highly experienced musicians who find themselves in a room together and play as never before.

A kind of acoustic rock, some would call it. Soft grunge, others would claim. Sung in English, they would all agree. Somewhere between Big Thief, Supertramp and an unplugged Nirvana show. But labels do not matter, the main thing is the substance. Which is elemental.

Sage, Theodora, Nico Lockhart and Zoé Hochberg already know each other, having worked together on tours and recording sessions. All have been professional musicians for over 10 years. And all have worked with artists as diverse as Woodkid and Victoires de la Musique winners (French Grammys equivalent) Clara Luciani, November Ultra, Pomme. Each is skilled in studio arrangement and the art of intertwining tracks on a computer. And each has a perfect mastery of stagecraft.

As a collective, they all want to achieve the same things: epiphanies and presence, friendship and purity. Their founding experience is a concert at the Paris venue Le Consulat where they feel a pressing need to return to their roots together. To be reborn as water, fire, air and wind. To no longer lose themselves in the meanders of demos and production. To get back to basics. To shake themselves into action.

In muggy paneled rooms, they write their first tracks, rehearsing them again and again with no breaks or safety nets. There are no more demos or rerecording, only the interactive dialogue of two guitars in synergy (Sage and Nicolas), the bass consolidating the beat (Theodora), and the cocoon of drums enfolding the whole (Zoé).

And over it all, casual but focused voices rise. First Sage’s, powerful in its acceptance of supreme fragility, and then the others, merging into warm, confident backing vocals that are both precise and attentive to any passing flaws – imperfections that are the stuff of grace.

In short, playing together to evoke the fallible, genuine progress of life. And so remind us of an obvious fact we sometimes forget: music is primarily an art of presence.