Marlon Magnée

Best known for touring around the world with La Femme, the award-winning band he co-founded 15 years ago, French star Marlon Magnée steps out on his own for the first time with Dark Star, his intoxicating solo debut. Co-produced by Renaud Letang (Feist, Manu Chao, Peaches) and recorded at Paris’s legendary Studios Ferber, the album is raw and exhilarating, blurring the lines between punk, rockabilly, boogie woogie, cold wave, and garage rock with a frenzied, wild abandon. While the songs here exude an effortless swagger, Marlon Magnée writes with deep and honest vulnerability, slipping from French to English and back again as he reckons with longing and desire and the maddening lengths to which love can drive us. The result is an alternately ecstatic and bittersweet debut, a thrilling blend of fuzzed-out electric guitars, analog synthesizers, and pulsing drum machines that manages to feel both vintage and modern all at once as it tips its cap to everyone from Elvis Presley and Lou Reed to Serge Gainsbourg and Kraftwerk.