Originally leaked online by the artist himself, Christine and the Queens’ fifth album, Hopecore, was released under a new name of Rahim Redcar (he’s now back to releasing as Christine and the Queens, and using Chris as his own name). Hopecore eschewed the sophisticated pop of his early years in favour of lo-fi, roughly drawn sonic sketches, and this flighty opener is built around ricocheting drum beat patterns that are eventually pierced wide open by laser-like synths. Upset at his label, grieving his mother and heartbroken, he released a third album, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), that was saturated in sadness.
Created in a two-week burst, the songs often felt undercooked, or missing crucial elements – such as choruses – but the suave Je te vois enfin is a clear highlight, all slinky 80s synth-pop strutting. If 2014’s breakthrough debut album, Chaleur humaine, was slow-burning, tactile and warm, then its taut Michael Jackson-influenced follow-up, Chris, was immediate, muscular and sweaty. On this lead single, featuring US funk experimentalist Dām-Funk, Chris playfully grapples with gender norms over Chic-esque guitar riffs and a finger-snap beat.
That it’s strangely thrilling – the “fefefafa” closing mantra sounds like an incantation – says a lot about Chris’s ability to surprise. Chaleur humaine’s brilliance was how it refracted typical pop subject matters – love, heartbreak, loneliness – through a more rarefied lens. On Narcissus Is Back, which uses a rib-rattling bass thump as its core, a soon-to-be-ex is placed within the context of the Greek myth of its title: a man so obsessed with his image that he kisses himself.
On this low-key highlight of producer Mura Masa’s guest-stuffed debut album, Chris weaves the various shades of his voice through burbling steel pan flourishes and sudden snatches of breakbeat. Lyrically, it’s brutally direct in its exploration of a relationship built on a trust that is steadily disintegrating. As Christine and the Queens, Chris’s outsiderhood comes baked in, with that moniker a reference to the drag queens that offered him solace.
On this slow-moving track, the isolation is laid bare, but with each “ever ever” in the song’s coda there’s also a feeling of exorcising demons by staring them full in the face. Inspired by crippling grief and Tony Kushner’s epic 1991 play Angels in America, Chris created the sonic equivalent of mausoleums on 2023’s epic, Madonna-assisted Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. A Day in the Water shimmers like mist on a lake as Chris offers himself up to a bigger entity, away from trouble bubbling elsewhere.
As with What’s-her-face, Chris explores alienation and otherness on The Walker. He juts out his chin at people staring and immediately recognises the polite, don’t-come-any-closer smile of confused strangers. The occasionally brutal lyrics sit in contrast to the music, which accentuates the lovely central melody with 80s drums and synth filigrees.
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