Juniore are returning with Trois, Deux, Un, their first album release in four years on the 13th September 2024 via Le Phonographe. The accompanying new single ‘Méditerranée’, is a breath of refreshing cool French air on a summer’s day, with its honky-tonk pianos, bounding basslines, shimmering guitar licks and charming 60s-style vocals that tip toe accross your ears, according to the trio, it’s a song “which is really only about describing the topless ladies at the beach in the south of France, their freedom and carefreeness,.” you can almost feel that cool beach breeze cooling upon your bare skin as you listen, dive into the summer with this delight. Watch the video below.
Brought together by their “common passion for the melodies and sounds of the 60’s and their lashing echo in music and film and art and fashion”, songwriter/vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Anna Jean alongside Swanny Elzingre (drums/vocals) and Samy Osta (producer/everything else), have so enchantingly re-imagined the flame burnt by francophonic cultural giants of years gone by – 60s Yéyé singers, by the likes of Michel Legrand, Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot – and like those greats, have revived their timeless appeal to a global audience..
And in many ways, the band’s third studio album to date is ultra-slick business as usual. Trois, Deux, Un, following that style that the band have made their own, channels those aforementioned French classics through the hyperactive lens of B-52s New Wave and 60s American garage-rock. A good portion of the record simply swaggers across its sonic spaces, cloaked in the kind of smokey, romantic mystery that many a Quentin Tarantino film soundtrack has made its iconic currency.
So far, so certain. Yet, while much of Juniore’s musical identity remains as strongly defined as ever, flavouring Trois, Deux, Un is also a drive towards a brighter optimism, and a feeling that their music always couldn’t be so darkly mysterious as before. And by necessity rather than choice. Taking three and half years to write, the band were “greatly” affected by the forced isolation of the pandemic,and how the family-bonds they had built through years of living in each other’s pockets on the road were totally severed across those long months. Having to adapt, for instance, of living, writing, and recording apart, within this topsy-turvy world, the band took the title for their new album by reversing the counting process of its predecessor Un, Deux,Trois; Juniore here are self-consciously negotiating their musical space, with all its’ foundational parts intact, but yet flipped totally turned upside down.
“The one thing we’ve probably allowed ourselves to do is to write more joyful music”, Anna Jean admits. “We feel it’s a bit like we’ve travelled to the other side of the mirror, and we’re trying to set the clock backwards in a sense with Trois Deux Un or maybe just preparing ourselves for take off.” she continues,““the new songs couldn’t be as comedic and dark as the previous ones wanted to be” she continues, “they had to be lighter because the world had enough real heaviness.”
UK Tour Dates:
August
30th: Psychfest, Brighton
31st: Psychfest, Manchester
September
1st: Psychfest, Edinburgh
4th: Lafayette, London
