New Video: Paris’ Hoorsees Shares Anthemic “Ikea Boy”

With the release of their first two albums, 2021’s self-titled full-length debut and 2022’s A Superior Athlete, the Parisian indie quartet Hoorsees — Alex Delamard (vocals, guitar), Zoe Gilbert (vocals, bass), Thomas Gachod (guitar, keys) and Nicolas Coste (drums) — received rapturous praise for a 90s-inspired sardonic guitar pop sound that’s steeped in equal parts melancholy and nostalgia.

The French outfit’s Joseph Signoret-produced third album Big is slated for a January 12, 2024 release through Howlin’ Banana and Kanine Records. Big reportedly sees the acclaimed Parisian band channeling Pavement and Weezer much less, and embracing their French roots. While evolving a synth pop-driven sensibility, they don’t completely shake their adoration of American guitar pop and indie rock: Electronic pads are paired with the sort of angular riffs that seemingly recall Is This it-era The Strokes.

Their third album is more than a stylistic shift for the Parisian band; it sees a major shift in duties within the band: The album sees the band’s Delamard sharing vocal duties with Gilbert. Whereas their first two albums were written, recorded and made in an expeditious fashion, their third album took three years to write and complete.

For the recording of the album’s instrumental parts, the band isolated in a house in the middle of the Southern French region of Ardeche and turned it into a homemade studio. Unlike the mandatory isolation of the pandemic, which seemed to heighten the slacker pop vibe, the self-imposed isolation of the Big sessions was to shut out outside distractions in favor of harnessing the buzz of fresh creativity.

Taking up production duties, Keep Dancing Inc’s Joseph Signoret helped to infuse energy into their live takes and add electronic accents inspired by French touch and Motorboats Studio’s Phillipe Zdar. Studio Noir’s Maxime Maurel was enlisted to mix the album’s material.

While sonically the material is rooted in a fresh, new sound, the band has maintained the absurdist lyrics they’ve been most known for, although they tackle social concerns while pointing out the irony of being in an overly marketed society, where appearances and consumerism take precedence over all. In fact, the album’s overall tone seems fatalistic about our future prospects — with the material deliberately giving way to long instrumental passages where the simplicity of the motifs blends with the rich production, seemingly as though the words had run out and they were unable to carry out the conversation.

Big‘s latest single “Ikea Boy” is built around an alternating quiet-loud-quiet song structure that features dense layers of buzzing, angular guitars and thunderous drumming for the song’s enormous and remarkably catchy hooks and choruses, and lush, wobbling synths for the song’s verses while Gilbert’s yearning and plaintive vocal floats over and then darts in and out of the mix. Sonically, the song sees Hoorsees crafting a sound that’s a sleek synthesis of Phoenix, Air and The Strokes, while revealing a band that can craft a seemingly effortless, anthemic hook.

The accompanying video by Guilliame Dufour and Lucas Martin is a hazy, yet gorgeous nostalgia-induced dream partially shot in a garage and in front of and in cars.