The Louche, Romantic, Slightly Feral World of Sébastien Tellier

In January, French singer Sébastien Tellier released his seventh studio album, “Kiss the Beast.” On the cover, fronted by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Tellier sports long hair like a guru who can’t contain his white button-down. “I’m ‘Kiss’ and ‘Beast,'” Tellier explains over Zoom, wearing a rhinestone baseball cap. (He clarifies, for those with a practical mind: “It is not an animal in the forest.

Embracing her identity is not something she always felt she could do. “I was a sad teenager,” he remembers, as a the banlieusard who grew up in Cergy-Pontoise, a similarly built area northwest of Paris (“no charm, not classy at all”). But he’s come a long way since he started making music for himself on a four-track recorder. His debut as a professional artist came 20 years ago, when he was the first to be signed to the new Air Record Makers label, with his 2001 album “L’Incroyable Vérité.” He then followed Air on a journey.

His hit song, the soulful but melancholic and touching “La Ritournelle” (which had many lives in musicals and commercials), relies on piano, bass, drums and strings; consider it timeless. “It’s not a question of productivity,” he adds. “The feeling never gets old.” He performed it live, singing before a piano and accompanied by a string orchestra, at the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paralympics in Paris.

Tellier released albums every few years: “Politics” (2004), “Sexuality” (2008), “My God Is Blue” (2012), “L’Aventura” (2014) and “Domesticated” (2020). Looking back at his discography, he says, “each album shows how [I’ve grown] above: my new state of mind, my new perspective on the world. ” In a real growth chart, his previous album shows what it means to be a family man and the prohibition of cleaning up messy children. “I don’t care that I’m not young anymore. I never bet on my youth, so I feel ready to be 50.”

His process begins with composition and characters; in the studio, he does all his demos alone. He plays until he hears something that “pleases my ear,” usually just three or four notes. “It’s a mix between luck and chaos,” he admits. “It goes along with singing… sometimes I can compose a song in 10 minutes, and sometimes it can be two weeks.”

Once he has his music, he tries to sing in English, French, Spanish and sometimes Italian, looking for a language that will help his song stand out. He finds that energetic songs are better suited to English, and French is better suited to intimidate music and feelings of love. (“I do my sad song in French and my happy song in English.”)

Equal parts pop singer and crooner, Tellier is very nostalgic. “My heart is still stuck in the 80s,” he admits. His favorite synthesizer, Prophet-5, from 1977. “I want to keep the best side of the past but … I’m trying to find something new,” he said, and that newness comes from trying “to find something that has no name. It’s a feeling; a question of style.”

In her latest work, the level of autotune is high (“I’m not like Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé,” she once said). He wanted Happy Night to be a hit; for casual confirmation, he asked himself “who’s the biggest hitmaker now? The guy who worked with The Weeknd is great! I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to call this guy.'” That guy was Oscar Holter, the mind behind The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” Tellier’s soulful, synth-y song features Slayyyter and Nile Rodgers.

He still likes French electronic music (like Daft Punk and Justice), and French hip hop and rap (like PNL and Booba). He says: “But I think that in the new world, we don’t care where the music comes from. “Now it’s not a question of the country, it’s a question of emotions and feelings. The country doesn’t matter anymore because the French can sing in English, the Spanish singer can sing in English … it’s an international game.” Said the former Eurovision participant! (He sang “Divine,” a song from the album co-produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, after arriving on stage in a golf cart, wearing a glittering blazer and inhaling a helium balloon. He set the scene of the 19th.)

In conversation, Tellier is refreshingly low-key. She talks about how much she loves flowers—which are all over her house—and describes them as “sensitive.” Gentleness, though the douceurhis style of expression can be found in his music, but it is shrouded in a kind of seedy masculinity. In most articles about the French artist, the adjective “louche” is inevitably dropped, as in reference to the infamous singer/dirtbag Serge Gainsbourg, the vibes that preceded it. French pop culture magazine Les Inrocks called Tellier”le chanteur à la barbe légendaire.” With a slip of the tongue, Tellier called her album “Kiss the Bitch.”

Tellier clearly plays with his image. As a follower of Salvador Dalí, he rightly likes to exaggerate his personality—sometimes, in ways that may seem questionable. His 2012 video “Cochon Ville it’s full of nudity and violence against women, but it’s presented as cult cosplay. The “Sexual” cover features a petite man on a donkey about to mutilate a larger-than-life naked woman, something Terry Gilliam might have dreamed up. Pitchfork once described Tellier as putting out “a particularly retro kind of theatrics distilled from early porn of the VHS era.”

Tellier toys with this. In fact, his appearance was revealed in January in Paris, where he was shown at Perrotin as a gallery. (There’s something in the air about artists in the galleries. Elsewhere in the Marais, his collaborator on the song “Amnesia,” Kid Cudi, né Scotty Ramon, recently showed paintings at Ruttkowski; 68.) The Perrotin exhibition was a kind of extravagant marketing in the lead-up to “Kiss of the Beast,” a collection of photographs interspersed with guested French artist Xavier Veilhan, a friend of Tellier’s. for a long time.

Tellier’s relationship with the art world is closely linked to Veilhan, with whom he first collaborated 20 years ago. “I went to his shop with my keyboard, I composed the music for the film in front of him,” he remembers. They worked together on the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which was conceived as a recording studio-sculpture; Tellier was one of the artists who were invited to perform one performance for the public. Down the line, Veilhan became his son’s godfather, and Tellier owns several of his friend’s works of art. Tellier also collects the work of the Hungarian-French Op artist Victor Vasarely. “I’m a bit of a hoarder,” he said defiantly. “I remember [the] big money.”

In today’s world, it seems that embracing one’s wild side, or “embracing the beast,” is an attitude that is already widely expressed and often has a frightening effect. At least Tellier’s take is reassuringly entertaining.

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