LOVE. HURT. REPEAT.

Description

Fifteen years after their first album "Time for a change", and with the experience of two others ("Elephanz" 2017, and "Rien de personnel" 2023), ELEPHANZ returns today with a fourth album that has the scent of first loves, those sung from the heart with hands clasped around a guitar. "Love. Hurt. Repeat." tells in ten songs a return to oneself, like coming home after years of traveling the world, only to realize that everything one needed to know oneself was already at the starting line. To help you understand what this new album makes me feel, I'd like to tell you about my meeting with Jon and Max in 2009, when I became the band's bassist. Sixteen years ago, I discovered these two boys and set off in their family Kangoo for my very first tour. Over the course of our first rehearsals around their childhood piano, I discovered their love for pop music in all its transversality, always seeking out the harmonies and melodies that touch the heart most simply and ease your sorrows along the way. With them, I learned to appreciate mainstream hits that I had previously snubbed on principle, and discovered the demanding art of melody, listening to them sing about love and friendship with unforgettable catchphrases. Discovering some of their new album's songs today, I think back to those two young men with big-city rock looks, cooped up in the living room of their family home, who only talked about leaving that boring countryside to live the high life in the capital (Streets of Rage). What I might have taken at the time for a spirit of revenge against the hostile environment of their adolescence was in fact an almost vital need to find their place among others, to feel understood in order to feel comfortable in their own skin. Today, I find them with the same guitar and the same cheap Juno as back then, but with the assured touch of years of concerts, writing, studio encounters, and all kinds of experimentation. The music of this fourth album has never been closer to that of their very beginnings, but the voices have freed themselves. They no longer sing about what they dreamed of being, but rather about who they always have been, their most distant concerns, sometimes even the darkest, but always to find the light there. It's as if ELEPHANZ had to travel around the world to come face-to-face with themselves. There is no longer shame in being who one is, and it is even the best way to understand oneself, exist, and heal. To heal from grief and heartbreaking loves, to understand the child one was, and the one who carried them (Mother), to forgive oneself, and ultimately to love oneself. This is what makes this record as sensitive as it is powerful and disturbing in its truth; it was written and recorded like a scream, live, in just a few weeks and with