By the beginning of 2023, L’Impératrice had accrued an enviable résumé, a roster of bona fides
that confirmed them as one of Paris’ most dynamic young bands. In only a decade, they’d matriculated from a good-times instrumental act created by music critic Charles de Boisseguin to a six-piece powerhouse whose sashaying mixes of funk and French Touch, disco and deep house now included the fetching vocals of singer Flore Benguigui.
They became international stars during that process, selling out all 108 shows in their 25-country run in support of 2021’s beloved Tako Tsubo. They dazzled at Outside Lands, Coachella, and with a capacity crowd in a Mexico arena. They won prestigious French prizes and had several songs—“Vanille fraise,” “Agitations tropicales,” “Peur des filles”—climb into the streaming stratosphere. But after two successful albums and all the acclaim, there was still one thing L’Impératrice was missing: a record where they made every decision, a set of songs that truly captured the band’s spirit both onstage and off.
And so, they decided to make exactly that by themselves, with a little help from an exciting set of new friends. After wrapping their sets at Austin City Limits in October 2022, the band began jamming in Texas, hatching the first ideas of what is now Pulsar, their third album and the most sweeping and forthright representation yet of what L’Impératrice is and can be.
Early that Autumn, they returned to Paris, rearranged their rehearsal space into a recording studio, and began to work at a breakneck pace to cut their own record before returning to the road. Pulsar radiates the energy and wisdom of a band that has helmed so many dance parties around the world on the way to finding itself and its sound. They move freely and authoritatively among the sounds they love, bridging hip-hop, kosmische, and modern pop with their most unabashed embraces of French Touch and international house ever.
Benguigui, meanwhile, boldly sings of self-empowerment, or of shirking beauty standards, ageism, and drab normalcy. These are apt messages for these incandescent anthems of experience, of being yourself instead of anyone else’s version of it.
As one might imagine, renting a Paris rehearsal space that could fit the six-piece L’Impératrice and its stacks of synthesizers wasn’t easy, even for one of France’s most celebrated new bands. So late in 2020, they accepted an invitation to command a long, narrow room in a rehabilitated factory just north of the city, reimagined for artists of all stripes. They transformed it into a comfortable but creative laboratory, panels of deep red and beige lining its length and surrounding its wide windows. All their gear was ready to go at a moment’s notice, to capture fresh inspiration and first takes.
In those early days of the Pulsar sessions in late 2022, L’Impératrice tried a novel approach, splitting into two teams of ever-interchanging members to explore new ideas. It was a way of incorporating every voice into writing like never before. After all, every member of L’Impératrice—de Boisseguin excepted, as he will admit with a ready laugh—is a well-schooled musician, pulling from idiosyncratic upbringings and enthusiasms.
The son of a classical harpsichordist, guitarist Achille Trocellier, for instance, came to his instrument only after years of playing Baroque music on the viola da gamba. Drummer Tom Daveau was once a heavy rocker. Bassist David Gaugué spent years playing the cello (as he occasionally does on Pulsar, too), while keyboardist Hagni Gwon was a professional violinist for a decade.
When the instrumentals spilled out of these teams, the band passed the tracks to 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. L’Impératrice started and finished Pulsar—that is, writing and recording in a studio of their own design—in about nine months. This was the sort of self-determination they’d wanted and now found.
On its first two albums, L’Impératrice was a self-contained band that worked with a producer and no guests. This time, though, Benguigui recognized that some of the band’s new instrumentals just didn’t fit her vocal style, at least alone. A longtime fan who had seen the band multiple times, Maggie Rogers flew to Paris to lead the svelte and graceful “Any Way,” approaching the song with an unabashed vim that inspired L’Impératrice as they muscled through the trenches of capturing their own record. They had a similar encounter with Erick the Architect, who was so enthusiastic about the sample- based and panoramic “Sweet & amp; Sublime” that Benguigui scrapped one of her own verses to make more room for him. And Italian singer Fabiana Martone crafted the melody for “Danza Marilu” the moment she heard its disco thump. Inspired by (and a rebuttal to) Serge Gainsbourg’s L’Homme à tête de chou, it is an anthem for aging women on the dancefloor, for
moving in spite of the strange looks that may ensue.
Pulsar opens like a window being slid open onto an unimagined world. Built from spare parts of songs they never finished, “Cosmogonie” is an exquisite and telling prelude, folding layers of neon drone and kaleidoscopic keyboards inside ever-shifting rhythms. It is a delightful benediction, a chance to inhale before this rush of songs both kinetic and critical begins. Above rubbery bass and slicing guitar, Benguigui sounds subversively polite as she impugns sexy expectations for women onstage during “Me Da Igual.” Written in reverse, with the vocal melody prompting the rest of the band to respond, “Girl!” is a compulsive defense of the unguarded emotions and passions that men often dismiss as hysterics. Benguigui is so cool and collected as she delivers this bit of personal gospel, knowing that her strutting band has her actual back. And during the title-track finale, where a casual confession of suffering climbs into a mighty climax rooted in redemption, the band intertwines dubstep, turntablism, and symphonic strings to offer a bracing conclusion: However we are is OK.
Throughout these 10 songs, L’Impératrice espouses the rare willingness to be real about life and its woes while also sounding like a perfect picture of joy. As L’Impératrice made Pulsar, they struggled with the question of every artist everywhere: Is it better to have a deadline that expedites the creative process, or is it better to let things linger, to spend as much time as you need in pursuit of the right idea? They are still playfully divided on this issue, but they know that their tight deadline was a boon here, prompting a collision of logistical circumstances that helped capture their ambition, experience, and confidence in less than 40 minutes.
Pulsar is a focused but far-reaching record, the jubilant testament of a band with plenty to say and the skills to say it themselves.
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