Angèle: Instinct review – Belgium’s biggest star is determined to do pop differently

As has often been pointed out, we live in an era where the traditional Anglo-American stranglehold over pop has been broken. Partly because streaming has presented listeners with a far broader choice of music than would once have been imaginable, and partly as a result of social media accounts doing the promotional departments’ job for them, the charts are now as likely to include music made in Seoul or Lagos as London or LA. Spurs’ 62,000-capacity stadium has recently hosted not just Jay-Z, Gorillaz and System of a Down, but India’s Arijit Singh, South Korea’s BTS, BigBang and Stray Kids, and Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny, who addressed the crowd almost exclusively in Spanish.Cover art for Instinct. Photograph: Courtesy of Angéle and Grant James-ThomasClearly, British audiences’ disinclination to be welded to English-speaking artists is a cheering thing. Equally clearly, there seem to be limits: the same interest hasn’t been afforded Francophone pop. The biggest French-speaking stars in recent memory have either dealt in dance music or acquiesced to recording in English. Belgian rapper Stromae has attracted media interest and co-signs from Kanye West and Lorde without ever progressing beyond cult status in the UK.Likewise, Angèle Van Laeken, who kicked off her career in 2017, broke Stromae’s record for the most number of weeks at No 1 in Belgium with her 2018 single Tout Oublier – taken from a debut album that went seven times platinum in her homeland – and has been a household name to Francophone audiences ever since. The closest she has come to British success was her appearance on Dua Lipa’s 2020 single Fever, a minor hit.Glitterbeat stomp … Angèle. Photograph: Kenza Le BasYou could argue that some of her music is quite geographically specific. Her second album, Nonante-Cinq, opened with Bruxelles Je T’Aime, a song in praise of her her home town, terrible weather and all (one of its lyrics translates roughly, and rather splendidly, as: “Tonight the sky will certainly be covered by a storm / but after the storm people will party and get the beers in”). But it also fretted about the possibility that Belgium might end up divided between French and Flemish speakers, a topic that’s seldom hotly debated when the British get the beers in. Then again, Bad Bunny’s most recent album was at least partially consumed by the question of whether or not Hawaii was a suitable model for Puerto Rican statehood, and that didn’t stop it reaching the UK Top 10.You would struggle to call Angèle’s third album a concerted push for Anglo-American success, although there are more lyrics in English than on Nonante-Cinq and some of the names involved might cause ears to prick up. Justice collaborate on What You Want, a fruitful collision of maximalist rave synths and glitterbeat stomp. And Soulwax crop up on Trop, which is impressively noisy, with an edge to the electronics and its take on a house pulse; it’s driven by vocals that alternately lean towards rap and are scrambled into incomprehensibility. Love Triangle, meanwhile, involves Caroline Polachek and French dance producer SebastiAn, a thrillingly discordant synthesiser arpeggio cutting through its killer chorus and sweaty-small-hours mood.Indeed, intermittently at least, Instinct makes a case that British audiences don’t know what they’re missing when it comes to Angèle, who has a penchant for suddenly grabbing the steering wheel and driving a song off road. On Verra starts out like a standard pop piano ballad – albeit with a hint of chanson about the melody – before it’s unexpectedly strafed with bursts of static and machine-gun-paced noise. You could initially imagine any number of pop stars essaying the sweet drift of Je Compte, but then it dramatically shifts gears, first into a four-to-the-floor rhythm topped with an assemblage of sampled gasps and warped vocals, then into a lo-fi piano ballad.This all carries the appealing sense of someone doing pop rather differently, although these moments are punctuated by more straightforward stuff. Some of it is great – the melody that floats above the chugging synths of Tout Décider is an unequivocal earworm – and some of it a little less so. The song F4ck 4ever is noticeably less diverting than its title; the cut-up samples and AutoTuned vocals that constitute Dis-le’s hook lie somewhere between unusual and tinnily annoying.It’s an album that is by turns really exciting and slightly frustrating, built for cherrypicking its highlights for a playlist rather than repeatedly listening to end-to-end. There’s enough here to grab the attention of anyone with an ear for left-field pop – one suspects any Caroline Polachek fans enticed by her appearance will be happy to stick around – but not quite enough to predict a broader shift in perceptions. One thing that unites all the disparate artists who have broken through pop’s language barrier is that they’re offering something that you really can’t get at home; so is Angèle, but only occasionally.This week Alexis listened toCameron Winter – $0 (Live at Carnegie Hall) A live version of the Heavy Metal highlight that alternately strips the song back – the string arrangement is gone – and somehow amplifies it: more simple, but more intense.