Papooz have today announced details for a London Oslo headline show on April 9, 2019, which will go on sale this Friday, February 8. 

 

The date follows a recent sold-out Scala date, and will arrive close on the tail of the Parisian band’s forthcoming new album release, ‘Night Sketches’, which is out March 8, 2019 via Half Awake/IDOL. Produced by Adrien Durand of Bon Voyage Organisation and with radio play from 6Music, the record is the follow up to Armand Penicaut & Ulysse Cottin’s 2016 debut ‘Green Juice’, which featured single ‘Ann Wants To Dance’, whose SoKo-directed video has since clocked over 12 million streams online. The band have recently released the new video for lead-off single ‘You & I’, which has clocked in excess of 100,000 views since being uploaded.

 

Filmed at Le Balajo – one of Paris’ oldest Cabaret clubs, owned by a wrestling dynasty – the droll video  for 70s piano ballad ‘You & I’ was directed by Armand’s girlfriend, director & illustrator Victoria Lafaurie and stars Ulysse’s other half, Danish actor & model Klara Kristin. Speaking about the video, Lafaurie says; “Like in Tex Avery’s animated cartoons, Ulysse & Armand are Klara Kristin’s conscience. Will she fall for the Devil or the Angel? We shot the video in Super 16 film. It was fun to mix the aesthetics of American cartoons with biblical clichés and a few ‘Ramen Western’ inspired scenes.”

 

Armand & Ulysse were originally thrown together as part of boozy gatherings of literary obsessives in their home city of Paris. Early and altogether more earnest ambitions to create a political fanzine together were soon ditched in favour of finessing the music pair had instead begun writing. Early computer demos of their warped, bossa nova-informed pop fed off of a shared aff’nity for bedfellows as unpredictable as the Beach Boys & Ella Fitzgerald, to The White Stripes & Karen Dalton.

 

Enabled by Durand’s butter-smooth production and Penicault & Cottin’s androgynous vocals (sung by the two Anglophiles in English throughout), ‘Night Sketches’ finds Papooz distilling these unlikely antecedents into distinctly skewed exotic pop, leavened with surreal, character-driven lyricism. Having met previously on the fertile French alternative scene – amongst other friends including La Femme, Polo & Pan and Feu! Chatterton – the duo originally sought out the Bon Voyage frontman Durand wanting to buy one of his synths – a Minikorg 700. Durand was so enamoured by the early demos for ‘Night Sketches’ he later heard, he lent them not only the synth but also his own production services alongside. 

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