Celebrate

Halo Maud’s new album "Celebrate" more than lives up to its name. The 12 songs of the albumoffer a seamless mix of French and English; analogue electronics, scratchy guitars and tumbling drums; dream pop, woozy Yé-Yé and 1960s and 2020s psychedelia. Recorded between Paris and Los Angeles, it’s a glorious mix that has the ability to leave the listener blissfully disorientated.

"Celebrate" arrives a few months after the tenth album by The Chemical Brothers that Maud provided vocals for much of. While that band’s influence might not be obvious on Celebrate, their dedication to pulling glorious psychedelic sounds out of the whatever instrumentation they find is very much in evidence. In the case of Iceberg – a cover of Fred Frith’s blissful Anthropocene hymn recorded with fellow French artist Flavien Berger – that’s instrumentation is mainly just a pair of human voices against a swirling beatless ambient backdrop. The result is utterly intoxicating.

An album of songs that blur language, and songs that visit people in dreams. Songs that draw a line between the mind expanding sounds of the first wave of global psychedelia and the music made by their modern day descendants. A record inspired by sci-fi as much as by a single guitar. So much to Celebrate. Time to join that party.