For Phoenix, the beat goes on
THE French disco-rock band Phoenix, known for giddy, heartstringtugging hits like 1901, takes years to produce its meticulous albums.
The band’s lead singer, Thomas Mars, remembers creating its breakthrough 2009 record, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. “After we had been working on it for two years,” he said, “a friend told me, ‘Well, it better be good’.”
Now, four years since the release of its last album, Bankrupt!, the Paris-based group has announced a plan to release Ti Amo on June 9. It may be the band’s most unabashedly romantic record yet, powered by a sleek, midtempo dance pulse and a vibe the guitarist Laurent Brancowitz said recalls “summer and Italian discos”.
But the album also hints at a darkness that surrounded the group while it recorded in Paris during a turbulent time, as its hometown absorbed a swell of refugees, underwent a surge in alt-right sentiment and endured terrorist attacks. On the night of the attacks at the Bataclan, a concert hall where Phoenix had played and attended shows, guitarist Christian Mazzalai was trapped in the studio, where the band was recording after the police shut down Paris.
“At some point when we were in the studio, there was a slight sense of guilt,” said Mars, sipping a pilsner in a cafe near the a New York home in Greenwich Village that he shares with his wife, director Sofia Coppola, and their two daughters. “But we were comforted by the idea that the four of us working wasn’t escapism or denial,” he added.
“When that became the guilt disappeared.”
Like his bandmates – all of whom he’s known since they were youngsters living outside Paris alongside future members of Daft Punk and Air – Mars, sporting a perfectly mussed in- clear, die-rock bedhead, is chatty and charming and prone to slightly nerdy asides about short stories or scientific principles. Since the core of Phoenix’s music is improvisational, it’s hard for him, or any band member, to explain why each album sounds the way it does.
“I think the record came out of darkness, out of concern,” said Daniel Glass, head of Phoenix’s record label, Glass- note. “But what’s resulted is this incredibly colourful record. And what we’re hearing from everybody, from KCRW to Apple to Pandora to Spotify, is that they’re loving this record. Because it makes them feel good.”
With Wolfgang, Phoenix achieved an increasingly rare level of success for a rock band – a Saturday Night Live appearance, a Grammy, a platinum single – wrapping that album’s tour cycle with a blowout show at Madison Square Garden, where they surprised the crowd with a guest spot from their old friends Daft Punk. While the band has never matched the sales of its 2009 disc, it’s remained a popular live act, with devoted fans who can catch Phoenix headlining festivals this summer from Atlanta to Osaka, Japan.
For Ti Amo, the band found an unorthodox place to create: an old opera house near the Pompidou Center, in the heart of Paris, that has been refashioned into a tech incubator, museum and concert hall. Starting in 2014, Phoenix took over a space on the top floor, where they installed synthesisers and recording gear and got to work.
Each morning the musicians would arrive alongside the laptop-toting young employees of various startups and put in eight or so hours – a process that felt to the band, all of whom have children, pleasingly like a regular job. Songs typically started as improvisations built around a loop created by Brancowitz. Interesting parts would be saved and cata- loged and eventually edited into songs. “We did a lot of experimenting,” Mars said. “We could go back and say, ‘Let’s get the MIDI from February 12th’, or, ‘Let’s get the first take’.”
In a phone interview from Paris, where the band was set to begin tour rehearsals, Brancowitz said that Phoenix didn’t set out to create such a sunny record – it just turned out that way.
But some of Mars’s elliptical lyrics seem to nod to the idea of finding joy or love in a darkening era. On the swirling album opener, J-Boy, which plays like a short, romantic film, Mars sings of a “hopeless world”, dying reefs and a sense of collective moral complicity. “It’s a sort of romantic sci-fi feeling I like,” Mars said of the lyrics. “That direction came in part from being bored with my own voice; I tried to find a sci-fi voice that’s kind of a character.”
A few days after the drink with Mars, the band’s bassist, Deck D’Arcy, called in from a rehearsal. Things were going well: Muscle memory was mostly taking care of the old songs, the new ones were working themselves out.
The concept for the tour, Brancowitz said, has something to do with “mirrors and duality”, but it’s an idea so hard to pull off that the band still is not sure if it will work. Which isn’t a bad thing: After almost 20 years together, discovering new territory is what keeps Phoenix inspired.
“The landscape is too wide,” D’Arcy said, “and we’re having too much fun to stop.”