Gwendoline - C'est à moi ça (2024) Hi-Res

Gwendoline’s music doesn’t give a fuck. Doesn’t make proper plans, as they keep telling anyone who’ll listen. Everyone will hear what they want on “C’est à moi, ça”, new album by two Brest-based boys on Born Bad. Some would have them be Joy Division or les Béruriers Noirs. Some would brand them cold-wave, dark-wave, chav-wave, you name it. We won’t.

You can’t sing that much about pub culture without paying your dues. Their first album was literally written on the counter. They have every right to shit on gyropod-riding suits when they’ve stolen their favorite bars. Just listen to “Le sang de papa et maman” to check from which well they draw the muddy liquor that gushes from this record. Though they won’t brag about it, they are definitely ripping new assholes to every social injustice warrior out there, with gusto.

Some songs can be sung, because they manage enough room for us in there. You can join on the chorus as one would for a soccer song, but they’re not going for stadiums. Pierre Barrett and Mickaël Olivette, two magnificent losers for whom « the end of the world began when they were born », just tell it like it is. They « don’t give a damn about writing like Beaudelaire ». Their lyrics taste like damp coasters and smell like retired microphones living in the bottom drawer. Every track is an opportunity to spit on every aspect of life that asked for it : vacation clubs, the generation before, the one after, low- cost living, trash TV. And themselves, no doubt, because they’ve got more important things to do than draw up socially responsible plans.

French duo doesn’t get it when, after years of loose ends, the it crowd wants to take selfies with them. And it’s not going to get any better with this new album, conceived and recorded at home, in Brittany. The dark, radical, no-nonsense instrumentals (Jake and Romain, guitar/keyboards) give Pierre and Micka a strong ladder to go piss on the parade from a great height.

Love them, and it probably already pisses them off. Their anger feels single-breasted and fair. We can’t afford nuance when everything tastes like butter gone bad.