New Audio: Bordeaux’s St Franck Shares Lush and Escapist “Dream Trap”

Franck Lada is a Bordeaux-based producer, singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and creative mastermind behind the emerging psych pop project St Franck. Lada’s career started in earnest with his participation in a number of musical projects in the UK that included sitting in on bass for Saint Leonard’s Horses for a few shows.

Lada stepped out into the spotlight with his debut EP, 2018’s Gamma Wave and a handful of singles that saw him establish a DIY/bedroom pop-meets- electro pop-meets psych pop sound, which he developed with some barebones equipment during flat shares in London: a computer, an 808, an Ms20 and Ableton.

Since his humble beginnings, the French artist has upgraded to a professional studio in Bordeaux’s bohemian La Bastide neighborhood. His forthcoming album Hard Drive Oddities is engineered by Mike Fridmann, and will be released by Courant Records. The album reportedly reveals a producer and artist, who’s part of a new generation of producers and artists, who are searching for meaning in a mad, mad, mad world. Sonically, the album is anchored around lush, sculpted arrangements paired with lyrics that encourage the listener to explore the inner world of their dreams and the subconscious.

Lada’s latest single “Dream Trap” is built around a lush and dreamily escapist soundscape: Starting the beep of an alarm clock, presumably startling the narrator — and in turn, the listener — awake, the song features woozy and glistening synths arpeggios, strummed acoustic guitar, a supple and sinuous bass line and bursts of twinkling keys and vocodered vocals paired with the French artist’s plaintive delivery. While sonically, channeling MGMT and Tame Impala, “Dream Trap” evokes the both the blissful nostalgia of a gorgeous summer afternoon — and the warm buzz of a half-remembered dream.