Angèle: Instinct Review – Belgium's Biggest Star Is Determined to Make Pop Different

Big at home but less so abroad, Angèle (RCA) gets help from Justice, Soul Wax and Caroline Polachek in a bold bid to broaden her appeal, though the resulting album can be both mainstream and daring. As often noted, we live in an era when traditional English-American pop has been stifled, partly because streaming gives listeners a far wider choice of music.

It has often been pointed out, we live in an age where the traditional Anglo-American stranglehold on the Pope has been broken. In part because streaming has given listeners a much wider choice of music, and in part because social media accounts do the work for them, the charts are now more likely to include music made in Seoul or Lagos than London or Los Angeles. The 62,000-capacity Spurs recently hosted not only Jay-Z, Gorillaz and System of Down, but India's Arijit Singh, South Korea's BTS, Big Bang and Stray Kids and Puerto Rico's Bad Bunny, who addressed the crowd almost exclusively in Spanish.

Obviously, the reluctance of British audiences to fuse with English-speaking artists is a happy thing. Just as clearly, there seem to be limitations: the same interest is not offered to Francophone pop music. The biggest French-speaking stars in recent memory have either dabbled in dance music or agreed to record in English. Belgian rapper Stroma has garnered media attention and featured hits from Kanye West and Lorde without ever surpassing cult status in the UK.

Likewise, Angel Van Laeken, who debuted in 2017, broke Stroma's record for the most weeks at No.1 in Belgium with the single Tout Oublier in 2018 - taken from his debut album, which went seven times platinum in his homeland - and has been a household name since he was introduced to French-speaking audiences. The closest she's come to a UK hit was her appearance on Doa Lipa's 2020 single Fever, which was a minor success.

You could argue that some of his music is quite geographically specific. His second album, Nonante-Cinq, opened with Bruxelles Je T'Aime, a song in praise of his hometown, terrible weather and all (one of its lyrics roughly and rather gloriously translates: "Tonight the sky will definitely be covered by a storm / But after the storm people party and get guests"). But he also worried about the possibility of Belgium being divided between French and Flemish speakers, a topic rarely discussed when the British import beer. Then, Bad Bunny's latest album was at least partially affected by the question of whether Hawaii was a good model for the state of Puerto Rico, and it stopped short of reaching the UK No.1 spot.

You can't call Angel's third album a concerted push for Anglo-American success, although the lyrics are in English more than Nonante-Cinq and some of the names involved may prick up the ears. Justice collaborates on What You Want, a heady collision of maximalist rave synths and gorgeous stomp beats. And Soulwax appears on Trop, which is impressively noisy, with an edge to electronica and its pulse in house. It's driven by vocals that alternate between leaning into rap and lingering in the muffled. Meanwhile, a love triangle involves Caroline Pollock and French dance producer SebastiAn, a rousing dissonant synthesizer arpeggio that plays into its killer chorus and sweaty small hours vibe.

Indeed, at least intermittently, Instinct makes the case that British audiences don't know what they're missing when it comes to Angel, who has a penchant for suddenly grabbing the wheel and driving a song off-road. On Verra starts out like a standard pop piano ballad—albeit with a hint of Chanson on the melody—before it's unexpectedly drenched in a flurry of static and machine-gun beats. At first you could imagine a slew of pop stars belting out the sweet drift of Je Compte, but then it shifts gears dramatically, first to a four-to-the-floor rhythm with a set of sampled gasses and warped vocals, then to a lo-fi piano ballad.

It all adds up to a fascinating sense of someone who does pop differently, though these moments are marked by simpler things. Some of it is great – the melody that floats over Tout Décider's pounding synths is an unmistakable earworm – and some of it a little less so. The song F4ck 4ever deviates significantly less from its title. The chopped samples and AutoTuned vocals that make up Dis-le's hook are somewhere between weird and downright annoying.

It's an album that's by turns genuinely exciting and a little boring, and made for picking out its highlights for a playlist rather than listening to them over and over again. There's enough here to grab the attention of anyone who listens to left-wing pop - one suspects any Caroline Pollock fan seduced by her looks will be delighted - but not enough to predict a wider shift in perception. What unites all the different artists that have crossed the pop language barrier is that they offer something that you can't really get at home. So is Angel, but only sometimes.

Cameron Winter - $0 (Live at Carnegie Hall)

A live version of heavy metal's finest that alternately reverses the song - the string arrangement is gone - and somehow amps it up: simpler, but more intense.