Polaris

Description

Émilie Simon makes her grand return with a true new album in 10 years!!
“Nothing and no one will be able to extinguish this flame within you” sings Émilie Simon right from the opening track of Polaris, her first true album in ten years. A long eclipse on the surface, which the French singer, musician, and producer has nonetheless taken advantage of to explore new territories, open new paths, and reinvent her musical vocabulary and narrative threads, which like Ariadne in a dreamlike world she extends in her wake to invite us to follow her blindly. After a film score (The Jesus Roll, by and with John Turturro), a foray between Earth and Mars during a series of singles, Émilie Simon chose in 2023 to remake her first album, in the studio and on stage, to finally close a chapter that began twenty years earlier. She also published Phoenix, a “vampiric” gothic tale, sung and spoken in alexandrines, whose central character, Lily Mercier, is also the one we find at the heart of the Polaris adventure. Clearly, that Lily is a projection of Émilie, in search of that polar star which symbolizes the never-extinguished desire to find her way. The dazzling as well, when one is a musician who seeks, always on the verge of igniting again for the infinite mysteries of sound and translating the shivers into songs. Such is the success of this album, sung in both French and English, which combines the obviousness of melodies and the demands of production, immediately captivating (the irresistible burn of Soleil) and enchanting over repeated listens like a lasting iridescence of a thousand sound fragments. Recorded in New York (where Émilie lived for a long time), Los Angeles, Montreal, Rome, and Paris (where she returned to settle), Polaris has its own mapping, whose universe is the standard scale, its pulse inspired by cosmic rhythms, its singular poetry that disturbs as much as it captivates and enchants. A sign that nothing and no one will be able to extinguish this flame within her.