Lucie Antunes and her AMAZING CARNAVAL have set their sights on an auspicious start to the new year, with five new tracks that explore the pop codes of contemporary music: erudite, complex, constantly seeking a balance between the most arduous rhythmic theory and the need to get people dancing, between the cerebral and the body that moves, taps and strikes. 

These new tracks round off the CARNAVAL album, released in April 2023, and form a new ‘Antunes cycle’: Lucie, a true band leader, has brought together the radical Swiss-Guatemalan artist Baby Volcano, the psychedelic poet François Atlas, French actress Anna Mouglalis and the young up-and-comer Superette to give voice to her music. The results are astonishing. 

First up is LUCHADORA with Baby Volcano, which sounds like a PMA between Peaches and Soulwax, a frenetic anthem combining club music, hip hop, trap and unifying pop mixed by Ammar 808, a leading producer on the new Maghreb electronic scene alongside Deena Abdelwahed.

LA CHAIR with French actress Anna Mouglalis is one of those tracks that makes you dance for a lifetime and breaks your heart, vibrant poetry for the dancefloor. Anna Mouglalis’ voice and lyrics carry Lucie’s music loud and clear, mixed with a firm hand in a velvet glove by Yuksek.

PARTIR À L’ENVERS is an upheaval, a piece of imbalance both rhythmically and vocally… you wobble, you stumble, you take things by the end to find the beginning again. It’s a symbiosis between the poetry of François Atlas (François and the Atlas Mountains), who sings in a calm, lascivious voice, lyrics that have no chorus or chorus. The music and lyrics respond to each other in an astonishing way, creating an exquisite corpse that drives you into a trance.

C’EST PAS GRAVE is a mantra-like song that’s an invitation to get moving: to get over everything, to gain height, to carry on living without collapsing. This deeply topical ritornello summons the ghost of Arvo Part, Brigitte Fontaine & Areski for its poetry and very post-situationist incantations. Performed by the Well Quartet and mixed by our friend Fred Soulard (Maestro / Limousine), whom we met on Lucie’s first album (SERGEÏ, released in 2018).

Finally, T’AS TOUT TON TEMPS, a surprising, sunny and totally conquering track. It’s epic R&B in the noblest sense of the word, featuring the bass and the exquisite flow of Louise Botbol aka Superette, who was poached by Lucie while she was still a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur to take part in the Carnaval tour. 

It’s amazing, isn’t it ?

27.02 – Amazing Carnaval live @ Centquatre-Paris / Les Inrocks festival with Baby Volcano, Anna Mouglalis, François Atlas, Superette 

→ Tickets