Acclaimed Paris-based electro pop sextet and JOVM mainstays L’Impératrice will be releasing their highly-anticipated, self-produced third full-length album Pulsar through microqlima records on June 7, 2024. Pulsar is an album, where the band — founder Charles de Boisseguin (keys), Hagni Gown (keys), David Gaugué (bass), Achille Trocellier (guitar), Tom Daveau (drums) and Flore Benguigui (vocals) — made every decision while capturing the band’s spirit both onstage and off.
Fittingly, the album reportedly radiates with the energy and wisdom of an outfit that has helmed countless dance parties around the world on the way to find itself and its sound. Throughout the album’s material, the Parisian JOVM mainstays move freely and authoritatively among the sounds they love, bridging hip-hop, kosmiche and modern pop with their most unabashed embraces of French Touch and international house of their growing catalog. Pulsar is also the first album of their catalog to feature guest vocalists, including acclaimed folk/pop artist Maggie Rogers and rapper/producer Erick the Architect among a list of others.
The album sees the acclaimed pop outfit trying a new creative approach: They split into two teams of ever-interchanging members to explore new ideas, led by the band’s founder Charles de Boisseguin. It was a way of incorporating every voice into the songwriting process like never before, pulling from idiosyncratic upbringings and enthusiasm. They then passed tracks to lead vocalist Flore Benguigui, a longtime jazz singer, who would sometimes write two-dozen vocal melodies for a song, just to see which one fit best. It was an arduous and exciting process that saw the band go from writing through recording in about nine months. For L’Impératrice, this was the sort of self-determination they’d longed for and now found.
Throughout the album’s material, the band’s Benguigui boldly sings of self-empowerment, shirking beauty standards, ageism and drag normalcy throughout the album’s material. These are apt messages for incandescent anthems of experience, of fully being yourself, instead of anyone else’s version of it.
Pulsar‘s third and latest single “Love from the Other Side” is the album’s first English-language single. Featuring fluttering and glistening synth arpeggios paired with a supple and propulsive bass line and bursts of strummed guitar, the song’s arrangement serves as a lush bed for Benguigui’s dreamily wistful delivery. Sonically, “Love from the Other Side” sounds as though it could have been on Gorillaz ‘ Plastic Beach or MGMT‘s Congratulations.
“The first time I heard the instrumental, I thought, ‘That’s the vibe,’ even though it’s really different than what we do,” L’Impératrice’s Charles de Boisseguin says of his encountering an arrangement that begin with tehe band’s Achille Trocellier and Tom Daveau, the most rock-orientated members of the acclaimed Parisian outfit. “There is a British side to it, like Gorillaz with a bit of MGMT.” The band’s frontperson Flore Benguigui and Nicky Green wrote the song’s melody and lyrics together, building off the idea of “the good ghosts that are around you,” inspired by the bass line’s slight spooky feel.