Malibù - Vanities (2025) [Hi-Res]

The French ambient producer's debut crystallises her nostalgic style into a set of deconstructed, liminal hymns.


In a vanitas painting, life is captured in ephemera. Popular with Dutch Baroque painters during the 16th and 17th centuries, the style used the still-life format to comment on the frivolity of earthly possessions. Artworks showcased scattered—and for the time, pretty mundane—stuff: a lute, a conch shell, a half-drunk glass of wine. The old masters didn't include descriptions of why each item mattered or what historical memory they were meant to evoke. But they rendered them in vivid detail nonetheless.

The French producer Malibu, whose debut album Vanities draws its name from the vanitas movement, imbues her New Age-inflected ambient with a similarly sharp eye for the totemic. Past records, like 2024's Essential Mixtape and 2023's Palaces Of Pity, evoked art-house film screen grabs—sunsets, abandoned castles—with deluges of trancey synths and dusky reverb. On Vanities, she sharpens her cinephile touch without committing to overly specific narratives, taking pleasure in the details left to a listener's imagination.

Vanities crystallises Malibu's sweeping, emotional sound outside era-specific nostalgia, working with stripped-back vocal etudes and spare improvisations on Baroque-period instruments like piano and cello. By culling her signature pitch-shifted choirs and making her vocals the focus, a classical elegance emerges to her collagist style. Positioned against longtime collaborator Oliver Coates's forte cello, she could be singing about any love or loss incurred in the past few hundred years.

But the right-in-your-ear sound design creates a natural sense of intimacy and immediacy. Throughout album closer "Watching People Die," an intermittent voice whispers close: "It's our secret. You can't tell anybody." It's never laid out, of course, what this secret is. This hushed, uncertain atmosphere is far more effective than a locked storyline.

There are a few artists within the frame of which one might ground Vanities: Oklou's pop-album-of-the-year choke enough, produced with Casey MQ; Brian Eno's work for Windows 95. Across the intricate loops of "So Sweet & Willing," you can hear the influence of her working partner Julianna Barwick's delicate vocal layering. But if one artist looms largest over Vanities, it's Burial. His and Malibu's styles differ (the seminal UK act draws from jungle and UKG), but they both compose incredibly rich sounds from organic sources: rain, thunder, whale calls, the blanket-like quiet of a twilight walk home.

On occasion, all this engineered haze and undulating melodies does push Vanities into a rut. After the stormy head rush of opener "Nu," "L'Empire du Vide" loses momentum, leaning too hard on an ambling flute line that rings muddy when compared to her tighter arrangements. "What It Breaks," though given direction by a strangely wheedling bass synth that stands out against the murk, also has an overly sedative effect. But whenever she seems stuck in a certain sung pattern or cello lick, Malibu rushes in with something stronger. "What It Breaks" ultimately bleeds into the album's best track, "Spicy City."

At their best, the songs on Vanities land like deconstructed hymns. On "Watching People Die," irregular polyphonic voices waver over a one-handed piano progression, like an a capella practice at the edge of the world. Vanities demonstrates her ear for orchestral instrumentation—juxtaposed against expansive atmospherics, it's a tone-perfect soundtrack for pondering Big Emotions like heartbreak and healing. You know, feelings evoked by life and death.

"When you're making tunes you think you're making a certain style of music… but you're not," Burial told The Guardian in 2007. "And then hopefully you get lost, and head off the path into the dark." With Vanities, Malibu takes those strides out into the unknown, returning with an aching record that seems suspended outside of time itself. Life is short, it's true—but with the fleeting time there is, Vanities is a gorgeous place to linger.