Critique Love - Critique Love (2025) Hi-Res

“Antoine Binette Mercier is a close collaborator of Julien Sagot, having been involved in the co-production, arrangements and mixing all her albums since Valse 333. The expertise gained through these projects — to perceive the song as a world freed from any agreed and formal framework — has greatly informed his new project Critique Love.

Unveiling the vast horizon of their first album, Critique Love invite you to a journey that will bring you from introspection to extroversion. A door to a plasticized journey of memories, a cry for palpitations, a scrolling of Teutonne highways, apocalyptic deserts, and probed cosmos — heard through a confluence of cinematic rock, apocalyptic western, industrial tensions, pop motorik, and dystopian cabaret. Mercier plays a large part of the instruments, supported by a precious batch of collaborators: Vocalists Frannie Holder (Dear Criminals, Random Recipe) and Lisa Kathryn Iwanychi (Blood And Glass, Creature), Robbie Kuster on drums, and François Plante on bass.

Having unveiled the band earlier this year, Mercier introduced their multi-faceted approach on two singles tackling depression, vulnerability, and a weakened mental state: The strangely cathartic Edge’s Line and the propellant yet cosmic As Before. The inherent energy of As Before here evokes an almost combative desire for healing, opposing a loss of control by sedation in its calmer passages. Both aerial and cerebral, vast and cloistered, this play with kosmische pulsations was composed by Mercier, with Holder on vocals, and is accompanied by a lo-fi, impressionistic video directed by Jimmy G. Pettigrew.

Languorous and dark, Edge’s Line is a hybrid of post-rock, blues and indie rock, while it’s lyrics document a state of acceptance where there is no longer any possible remission. Quietly establishing its pathos through strings and voices, this piece evokes a deep mental exhaustion where everything seems to be on the edge of collapse — a sense of abandonment near the tipping point, which opens up to a certain serenity. Here again, Mercier is accompanied by Holder.”