Times

1. I Cry All Day
2. Just Need Your Love
3. We Light The Sunshine
4. Cause I Got A Chance
5. Closer To You
6. Please Me
7. The Fear Is Blue
8. Stand Back
9. No Sweet Surrenders
10. I See Myself
11. Steel
12. Endless Lines
     

When you listen to Hyphen Hyphen it's hard to believe that they're such a young group (the average age is 22 years old), and even though their CVs talk about the city of Nice, Santa (vocals), Adam (guitar), Line (bass) and Zaccharie (drums) it's clear that they spread their wings a long time ago, confidently joining the international music scene and freeing themselves very quickly of the style we expect of most artists today and the pigeon-holes we place them in. At a time when everyone is aligning themselves with a particular movement, style or fashion, and where everyone seems to want to stack up their musical references, and, most importantly, have the right ones, Hyphen Hyphen is simply Hyphen Hyphen. This is all you could ever want from an artist or a group, that they have their own language, their own voice, their own music, that they have a personality without worrying about people's expectations. Santa, Adam, Line and Zaccharie only aspire to that, being themselves, extricating themselves from classic pop rhythms and its somewhat mechanical customs. They imagine their tracks as film soundtracks, works of art, paintings, screenplays yet to be filmed. At home, composing is creating, finding a sound that evokes a colour, a picture and not just one note following on from another. They confess that they are of their generation: one that is fuelled, thanks to technology, by everything that previous musical decades had to offer, one that is not afraid to draw on the most successful mainstream music in the pursuit of breaking new ground. Seeing music in the same way as if Tarantino was called to film a blockbuster about outer space, or Spielberg embarked on a film for Sundance? In 2015, there's no problem with that. This is where Hyphen Hyphen finds its impetus, where the spacious and the epic take on the rugged and energetic. The choruses are sublime and melodic, to music that contains nothing put there simply to pander to expectations. The gimmicks, the hooks, the usual structures that make rock, pop or electro today are rewritten and revisited here. A fierce desire to avoid getting stuck inside a musical fad, but instead to look for the right track, a timeless melody. Here, thee desire to make a record is the desire to make their record, regardless of what is all around them. The strength of the group is in its personalities, a mini-republic of 4 musicians, but first and foremost 4 producers, where each person can work on the parts of the others, where everyone works for the good of the whole track rather than just focusing on their own instrument.

And this is how they have approached the album, like different producers seeking the right ingredients, on their own, in a 2, in a 4, swapping sessions, laptops, hard drives, ideas on each other's instruments, sometimes up to the last minute, until the mixing happens in the studio. For 1 year they looked through the hundreds of ideas and tracks for those which were most similar to Hyphen Hyphen. Hyphen, the punctuation mark that shows a connection, because of the link between each musician, between the band and the audience, the link between their music and their love of the image and art: tracks where a multitude of Dali-style objects are paraded, and then one instant later comes Hopper's melancholy and light. Is it hard to channel such energy into creation? No, Santa and Adam have known each other forever, as far back as their earliest memories and now their life as a 4 is already long-established; it's been 5 years already, 1/4 of their lives, more than 200 concerts, enough to know each other inside out. Especially since it hasn't just been about the beautiful stage sets of Solidays, the Eurockeennes, Rock en Seine and the Printemps de Bourges, but also the crazy and bizarre times, the concerts in the snow, on a boat, or even on the water itself, wherever it is possible to play, or almost. It's easier to write music together when you already have so many shared memories. "Times" came out of this year's sessions and saw the light of day at the ICP studio in Brussels. The perfect place for creating music, where almost any instrument capable of inspiring a musician is available. It's difficult for people from outside to enter the Hyphen Hyphen Republic, since the 4 of them have such a clear, and extremely accomplished, vision for their music. But a few names quickly spring to mind: Julian Delfaud credited on the albums Woodkid, The Shoes or Revolver and Antoine Gaillet who appeared on the albums of M83 and Julien Doré. They have mastered this almost contradictory way of playing with power and precision, like modern electronics, a group that has showed up with acoustic and totally analogue instruments. And by the end the result is there to be seen. Just the voice remained. Just as the group says, melodies and words feed music and together they build the emotion of each piece. And the choice to sing in English is often a dangerous one in France because even though Santa's mother is American, there's no room for amateurishness, no margin for error. If Beyoncé or Christina Aguilera worked with Guy Roche, why can't Santa? So the US producer and vocal coach came to France, to his parents' home in Coco Beach to direct the vocal takes. A small but not insignificant detail and one that shows the fierce desire of the group to achieve the goal they have set themselves, to make this album a modern and universal object. The gamble paid off.

JUST NEED YOUR LOVE hits you from the word go. A subtle combination of the 90s vibe of his piano and the powerful unstoppable pop of this chorus envelops you and lifts you off the ground. Singing is an instrument, it is this which leads the rhythm of the couplets, and it is this which resonates like a gospel as you sing along with "And I just Need you love” at the top of your voice. We don't know whether to dance or shed a tear. Dance? Yes, that's another thing this album sets out to do, emotion but also energy. Like STAND BACK, driven by its guitar and heady keyboard and an unstoppable chorus. It's hard to imagine anyone not having their hands in the air when they play this song live. Here you can feel all the potential the album has for its staging, a track that gives you a strong idea of the energy you'll be able to find on stage. You feel an electrical Hyphen Hyphen, which has thrown everything it's got at a real spectacle on stage. Throughout this album Hyphen Hyphen proves its ability to create perfectly bitter-sweet moods, both on the up-tempo tracks and the quieter ones. Just like CAUSE I GOT A CHANCE, that sounds as a new-wave piece has been screwed and chopped but reinterpreted with an R'n'B production which is both modern and poignant. Like "We light the Sunshine", restrained, delicate, and this chorus that won't leave you alone. TIMES is a subtle album. When the mood subsides, we are given the tracks "Endless Line "or" The fear is blue”. The song goes right to your heart. Around a floating melody, the musical arrangements envelop Santa's voice, enhance the emotion and give the tracks a timelessness. It's as if this album has always existed somewhere inside us and finally we got to listen to it.