FEATURE:
Raging in English
PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller
Inside Christine and the Queens’ Phenomenal PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE
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A sensational album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Kooiker
that must rank as one of the best of the year, there is something epic and truly staggering about Christine and the Queens’ PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. An album that you need to buy and investigate fully, I wanted to spend a bit of time with it. I do not normally spotlight and dig into such a new album. It is so arresting and wonderful, I needed to go deeper. In addition to some of the songs on PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, this is a the most personal and revealing of Christine and the Queens’ albums. Héloïse Letissier (a.k.a. Chris, Christine and the Queens, and Redcar) called the album "the second part of an operatic gesture", including Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) (2022). Inspired by Tony Kushner's 1991 play, Angels in America, he opens and his heart and soul through PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. An acceptance of and prayer of the self, there is something operatic when it comes to this amazing album. With three different acts - PARANOÏA, ANGELS, and TRUE LOVE -, you are engrossed in an album that comes from the depth of Chris’ soul. He has really created this true masterpiece for 2023! I love how there are some really cool samples on PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. Tears Can Be So Soft contains a sample of Marvin Gaye's Feel All My Love Inside; Full of Life contains a sample of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, whilst Track 10 contains a sample of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Lucky Man.
I will come to a couple of reviews for PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE soon. There are some fascinating interviews that take us inside the album. We also learn more about the inspiring and remarkable Chris. He recently spoke with Vulture about his songwriting process, and what it was like working with Madonna. It is fascinating reading his words. So insightful, articulate, intelligent and passionate, it is clear that PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE means so much to Chris:
“Recently, Chris — a.k.a. Christine and the Queens, or Redcar, or Red — began talking to angels. It had been a difficult few years for the 34-year-old French singer: He lost his beloved mother, went through a breakup, officially adopted he/him pronouns at an excruciatingly transphobic moment in history, and released an eccentric concept album (2022’s Redcar les adorables ètoiles) that, by his own account, baffled fans and critics alike. Calling on spirits was a way to gain wisdom and guidance through grief, and the practice eventually served as the inspiration for his latest project, Paranoia, Angels, True Love.
Chris’s music has always been tinged with the avant-garde, defying easy categorization and pushing the boundaries of pop. 2014’s Chaleur Humaine, a sparkling debut that vaulted him to stardom in his home country, saw him singing about “draw[ing] her own crotch, by herself” and “dying before Methuselah”; on 2018’s confident, sultry Chris, he mused cheekily about not “feeling like a girlfriend,” but “damn, I’d be your lover”; and his pandemic-era EP La Vita Nuova dug into bone-deep sadness and featured an accompanying short film in which he morphs into a seductive vampire. Paranoia, Angels, True Love (out June 9) is equally ambitious. Loosely based on Tony Kushner’s 1991 opus, Angels in America, about gay men manifesting their own angelic visions amid the AIDS epidemic, the album is overflowing with fresh, heady ideas and contradictions both sonic and philosophical.
You wrote some of these songs in 20 minutes?
Yeah. I rarely write lyrics first; I work on the production. I just turn the mic on and launch the horses. There’s devotion in that practice that infuses my life — I started working on how to be a better human so that the music could resonate with something greater. And I put more faith into my practice. I was not just trying to write songs. I was trying to understand something, waiting for visions. I was thinking a lot about non-artists who are struck by something invisible and moved to produce art. As I wrote the songs, I was in a state of self-hypnosis almost all the time. I’d wake up really early and write. And the rest of the day I was praying and walking for hours in L.A., doing poetry on my own, for no one.
When you say pray, is there a religious dimension? Who or what are you praying to?
I’m praying to the spiritual dimension of my work and my life. Religion is so interesting and tragic because it’s a language of power, made to install rules. For me, that’s not what spirituality is about. But I definitely love the form of praying as a way to believe in, notice, and observe energy. I became interested in the study of how music can create a cradle for everybody’s emotions. I started to think heavily about rock and roll, actually. I started really listening deeply to Led Zeppelin, which I didn’t know much about. I was like, What a fantastic piece of catharsis for someone to receive. The singer is a shaman, going wild, telling a story, telling the truth.
I’m always trying to think about how artists are relevant. Fame obliterates the function of an artist and of art, which is for me, coming from theater, a place for everybody to process their emotions. It’s hard to let yourself cry. Sometimes, I need a piece of music — maybe one that’s 12 minutes long, where I have the space to unwind — to help. So I thought, If I want to be that kind of performer who’s cathartic for other people, I have to be somebody who can surrender to music and see what happens.
Your last album was almost entirely in French. This one is almost entirely in English. You’ve swapped back and forth over the course of your work. What does each language mean to you artistically?
This record was made in America. So I surrendered to who I could be in America, which was more myself, at the stage that I was at. Sometimes you have to go where nobody knows you to have a different name. I started to use my pronouns. I feel like English is also a space for me to explore further away from my past. The French language is loaded for me. It’s a maternal language. It’s beautiful but intricate. English gives me new possibilities without losing my poetry. I wrote the whole record in English probably because I felt more comfortable raging in English. And I wrote Redcar as a letter to France; it was a distillation of my research in French, for the French people. But it got misunderstood, of course. I always joke that I did an experimental ’80s French record in France. They tend to chastise first, then embrace. [Laughs.] I always say, “Redcar 2026.”
As in Redcar wasn’t understood in its time?
Oh, yeah. I was working with a very rough sound, like a dirty cathedral. And I’m talking about actually being a knight. It was risqué, for the dandyism of being risqué. I mean, I loved doing Redcar. I loved it as a piece of theater. It was only three nights of performance, and I wanted the record and the performances to be like a Jodoroswky-infused setup, where I was inserting myself like a key in a lock, to just understand why I wrote that record. It was dashingly experiment.
Let’s talk about Madonna. You first met in 2015 when she pulled you onstage during her Rebel Hearts tour, bent you over and spanked you, handed you a banana, called you “Christina,” and said she loved your work. Did you know in advance that all of that was going to happen?
Yes, her choreographer texted me, “Hey, do you want to appear onstage?” I feel like she tested me a bit. She’s a dominatrix, really. So when I met her, I just abided by and respected that: “You can call me Christina. Hopefully you’ll see me again, and maybe this time you won’t call me Christina.” [Laughs.] It’s playful. The funny thing is, I crossed paths with her again through a dancer that toured with her; Madonna is a legend inside the dance world, and I work so much with dancers. And Chris was so infused with her wit — she has a strong wit and a strong whip!
How did you end up getting her on this new record, and who is this Big Eye character she plays for you
Working with Mike, we ended up on a poem uttered on YouTube by one of those artificial, computer-generated voices. I was like, “That’s uncanny, but it sounds like Madonna. I wonder if the voice was shaped around such an iconic one for comfort.” So I started to think about an ambivalent character who is an all-encompassing eye. Kind of like the Laurie Anderson song “O Superman,” where you don’t know what the voice is — is it the all-knowing power of love? Is it just a computer in the end?
And I was like, Madonna could actually play a Broadway character on this record. She’s such a fantastic actress. So Mike took the phone and called her. I was like, “Ahh, I’m not quite there yet!” But I had to be ready in a few seconds, so I explained it, and she said, “You’re crazy. I’ll do it.”
You’ve always pushed against the corporatization of queer identity, this idea that visibility equals progress, and you’ve also spoken about the need for art to feel dangerous — that safety and glossiness is the death of art and of queer art specifically. Were these things you were thinking about when making this record?
Not really. This time I didn’t want to think about the metatext of queerness and gender at all. I think I am quite pessimistic on the state of that. It’s very normalized now to have everybody get excited about rainbow T-shirts for Pride Month, all while people are being killed and laws are being passed for inequality. Since I was very young, I always suspected when they asked these questions with gleaming eyes: “Oh, you feel like you’re queer?” Gleaming in a way that felt unhealthy — not with curiosity, but with fetishism. I felt so trapped early on. But writing this record, it was just an absolute experience of music. An unadorned moment. My life after this record — I became more acute in how I want to exist as someone who doesn’t abide by that system.
So coming back to the industry with the new knowledge of who I am, and expressing who I am, I was terrified that yet again I would be eaten by the big machine. It’s still commodified. We’re still classified as “queer artists,” which doesn’t mean anything. Because art is deeply queer. It’s a human choice, a free will that warps reality. Queer is the act of warping what is constraining. It should be more celebrated as a force than as a state. I don’t know if I am queer, but some of my gestures are deeply queer”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller
There is one more interview that I want to come to. DAZED asked Chris about true love and the discovery of the self. I do see and feel PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE is a crucial moment of self-discovery. If the album can seem quite long (just over ninety-six minutes), it is well worth listening in a single go. It will definitely leave its mark on you! There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most important albums you will hear all year:
“It’s weird that life can be a process of solidifying your authenticity somehow, and then it’s all about conveying that to the outside world, which can be a process in itself.
Christine and the Queens: It’s fascinating. Even to see how the world answers differently when you create something differently for yourself. But yeah, I totally agree and that’s very well said – life is a solidification of your intention. I like the idea of life having meaning. Like, I am obsessed with love itself. Art devoid of love has no form of… I don’t know, I don’t even want to wake up.
You have a song called ‘True Love’. What is your definition of true love?
Christine and the Queens: I personally feel unable to vouch that I know true love because I feel like I’m not even there yet in terms of loving myself enough. True love seems to be this all-encompassing love that accepts everything. I am not at that stage in my healing. I feel like love is an experience of discovering my wounds as well… I want to work on a record called True Love actually – it’s just a very solemn title and a bit vulgar on its own. It's terrifying to me.
You speak about true love almost like it’s a spiritual entity, like in the same way people speak about God or something like that.
Christine and the Queens: I don’t know if it’s because I’m heartbroken or hopeful.
Sometimes I think that when you’re a child, or even a teenager, that’s your ‘true’ self and then you get further away from that and have to try and find that person again.
Christine and the Queens: For me, it’s linked to a big wound because my teenage years were the beginning of my dysphoria, which I attempted to push down. But I feel like my teenage years could be now. It’s often the case for people who transition later in their life. A lot is coming back actually: smells, things I felt… I pushed that shit down for a long time. Losing my mum also made me revisit all that shit.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller
I guess when you’re a teenager people start projecting onto you. You become more ‘seen’ in a way you never were before.
Christine and the Queens: I remember the socialisation at 14, and my discovery also of the confines of patriarchy on women’s bodies… it was the start of this fight. I remember seeing it, panicking and being like ‘I see myself in none of it. I don’t even know where to take part in the fight.’
You’ve always been a proponent of fluidity in all senses of the word – artistically, personally, even in gender presentation. I feel like society is afraid of fluidity. Why do you think some find fluidity so frightening?
Christine and the Queens: I don’t know what people are afraid of. But human identity is still organised around these two poles. I’ve been having conversations with even my trans peers sometimes who were disrupted by me acting my masculinity but not for example taking hormones. Society itself is built on this approach. Even the French language itself is polarised between the masculine and the feminine. There aren’t the tools to think freely even in the conceptualisation.
So fluidity is acting a state of water, centred on the spirit. The spirit is revolutionary by nature, because society doesn’t understand the concept of the spirit. It only understands the concept of positioning through identity. For me, the spirit is about shedding the concept of identity. You just keep the heart. Sorry I’m abstract but it’s so painful for me. I feel like we are wasting our time, as well, trying to define queer. Queer is just a question. Queer is something that’s not straight”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller
I am going to get to a few reviews. There has been so much love shown for the extraordinary PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. The Guardian awarded it five stars when they sat down to listen. The structure, narrative and scope of the album is so unconventional. Almost a work of art rather than music. Chris taking us into his heart and desires. Into his fears, realisations and passions. Such a rich and astounding work:
“When Christine and the Queens first appeared in the anglophone world in 2015, the name was an alias for Héloïse Letissier: a French artist with an extraordinary line in immaculately cool, obliquely catchy, 80s-flavoured synthpop that mused on queer identity. By 2018, Letissier had become Chris – the eponymous, androgynous protagonist of her funky second album. Then, last year, the musician announced he was now using male pronouns as well as another moniker: Redcar, also the title character of his third album, Redcar les Adorables Étoiles.
That record, a reflective, slippery, not-quite-satisfying collection sung in French, was met with a muted reception. Now it seems simply a warmup for this masterpiece. Letissier’s clearly rocky path to self-realisation has been entangled with seismic grief – in 2019, his mother died – and Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is a howl of despair sublimated into astonishingly beautiful experimental pop, drenched in warm celestial light, punctured by spikes of confused pain. On Tears Can Be So Soft, loss is bluntly aired – “I miss my mama at night” – over a syncopated raindrops-on-the-roof beat and a minuscule snippet of Marvin Gaye. A distorted “fucking” is bellowed over sweet Johann Pachelbel strings on Full of Life. True Love couches romance in inescapable grief (“make me forget my mother”), the sound of a heart monitor and blasts of static.
The trademark nostalgia remains – trip-hop and 80s soul and dance-pop provide sonic templates, while Madonna appears as a deity-like narrator – but it has been warped, hauntingly, and interspersed with the language of contemporary rap (co-producer Mike Dean has worked extensively with Kanye). Hypnotically melodic, clever, stylish, serious, fun, addictively unexpected and euphorically danceable, it’s the kind of pop they don’t make any more”.
In another hugely passionate and adoring review, DIY talked about the album and its connection and discussions of religion. How this Pop music becomes religious. They also highlight how Madonna’s presence is as a disembodied voice. Almost as this heavenly spirit or spectre. It is such a compelling album from one of music’s innovators and geniuses. This is a listening experience that everyone needs to go through:
“On ‘PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ - the second, third and fourth parts to 2022’s ‘Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)’ - Chris reembodies his concept character, Redcar. Following his mother’s death in 2019, Chris’s fourth full-length devours omnipresent grief, squelching its teeth into and reemerging from it like a worm into an apple, colliding with undiscovered seeds of pain to craft a musical bildungsroman of loss, divinity and rediscovery. Across 20 pop operatic tracks, Redcar undergoes euphoric devastation and metaphorical death, entering the brightest light with all the profound ecstasy of Prior’s visions in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the play from which the album takes inspiration. This approach positions reality as narrative arc, wherein the performance of succumbing to pain is to find peace and rediscover joy. Take ‘Tears can be so soft’, a Marvin-Gaye-infused musing on the cathartic power of sobbing: “Tears can be so good for those who dive in them […] Let them roll on your face, girl,” he sings. Concurrent with the dramaturgy, Chris sets the bar high: the record’s brilliance lies in an innovative ocean of modern opera, blending elements of soul, pop, trap, R&B, drum ‘n’ bass and musical theatre. The presence of hip hop producer Mike Dean on the album lends a post-pop sound. On ‘PARANOÏA…’, modernity is conjoined to high art, an affinity for which reaches caricaturist highs on the transformational, visionary ‘Full of life’, which samples German composer Pachelbel. Meanwhile, the disembodied voice of Madonna across three experimental tracks paints a lucid picture of the artist as an embodiment of consciousness, motherhood and God (see triumphant standout ‘Lick the light out’). Pop music, then, becomes religious, while the meshing of anachronistic art, music and pop culture deities crafts beauty from the seemingly disconnected: transcendental poetic art pop sculpted - chiselled, in fact - from rapturous spirituality. A far way away from debut ‘Chaleur humaine’, yet just as unafraid, ’PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ is like no other exploration of grief - a new magnum opus”.
I am going to end with The Line of Best Fit’s assessment of PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. If you do not know about Chris and Christine and the Queens’ work, then I would implore you to go back to the 2014 debut, Chaleur humaine. There is this unfolding and evolution as you move through the albums. The transformation and awakening of the Nantes-born wonder. I cannot wait to hear Chris’ next move. I have listened to the album a fair bit, and it is one hard to shake or forget! Such an almost profound and moving album:
“Earlier this year, Chris dressed up as his alter ego Redcar, performing every song on his previous album Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) with such intensity that every movement he made sharply conveyed the ache of fear and longing. The record served its purpose well: a prologue, quiet and unobtrusive, setting the stage for a grander, more monumental act. A self-reinvention could be foreshadowed by these subtle shifts in sound and storytelling – the melodies more mellow and slow-burn, lyrics more distant and abstract. His musical identity is transforming into new shapes, and we’re here to witness it in real-time.
The latest offering, titled PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, is his largest, most ambitious album to date, spanning over an hour and a half. It’s as enthralling and enigmatic as the tales of the mystique, embellished in epic theatrics and artful references. Part of its glory is attributed to one of America’s greatest plays, Angels in America, from which Chris took inspiration. The main themes of the play – prophecy, escapism, tragedy, and change – also appear on the record as he dives into the waters of loss, identity, and, of course, true love. Each of these subjects reserves an expansive “section” of its own, resulting in the record having 3 total acts, like an actual play in the theatre.
Sprawling and deeply passionate, the music drifts effortlessly into seraphic soundscapes as Chris warbles about his troubles: more theatrical and slow-paced than it is bombastic and ear-catching. With infectious, dancy hooks traded for meditative yet at times eruptive atmosphere setters, PARANOÏA may steer the audience’s attention more towards the lyrical content and his elastic, hard-hitting voice, but the music itself never loses its significance as the narrative’s propeller. “A day in the water”, for example, has swirling synths behind his reverberating singing, words and phrases like “father” and “let me be” echoing, each time reinforcing the message of the song: expectations and grief heft off, and he’s free.
This project is massive, a sprawling odyssey that centres on the life of a person who is so in love yet, at the same time, so in despair. The thunderous riffs, angelic piano drips, and glitz of transcendental synths, which Chris concocted with Mike Dean, bring PARANOÏA forward not just as a record with 18 tracks, but also as a musical play rich with poetic and elaborate observations of human nature, even if some of which are considered more of an individualistic viewpoint. Like Angels in America, whose tormented characters seek shelter, a place to escape and cater to their desires, Chris embarks on a journey, skittering away from grief and its poignant suppression. “Angels of light, take me higher / Make me forget my mother,” he sings after a deeply vulnerable confession: “I need you to love me.”
A vast, ever-stretching platform that is PARANOÏA, Chris sets his artistic spirit free by broadening his musical scope, covering as many influences and genres as he deems fit. The tracks here morph from one form to another, becoming a spectrum that fuses electronic balladry with maximalist pop music. On the 11-minute “Track 10”, Chris cries “Sweet lover of mine!” over Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man” sample, the potions of love in full effect. He’s so choked up by the alluring scent, the sweet, hypnotising moves of his lover, that he ascends to a realm lush with sparkly, hazy colours. His voice rises skyward along with the fervent drums, the resplendent choir gliding just behind him. Spoken words on 90s New York and his predecessors spill later into the song – shifting, fluid, monumental, mercurial. It’s unarguably his most impressive song yet.
Madonna, omnipresent as ever, joins Chris as the Big Eye on the terrific “I met an angel”, where he tackles with overwhelming sorrow. “Terrestrial food is of no importance now,” she coaxes him, destruction kicking under, ready to wreck his soul. His longing is immense, and he finds transient solace in believing that his mother is still with him in other forms. “She’s in the singing stream / She’s in the cats’ and the dogs’ eyes,” he sings with determination, tides of electric guitar gushing over him. “In the birds falling up from the trees.” She appears again on “Lick the light out”, in which Chris finally regains his footing, accepting his fragile state of mind, Madonna’s perilous voice disappearing as a result.
But before this revelation, 070 Shake accompanies him as he succumbs to indulgences bigger than himself on “True love” and “Let me touch you once”, the latter being one of the most sensual, enticing pieces on the record. Here his voice twists, bends, flexes out, spattering “I’m your man” and “parles-tu français ?” as if lost in a fog tinged with substances. Fortunately, this stage doesn’t last long; songs that follow slowly see him recuperating and finding himself once again: a glorious metamorphosis. In the end, Chris arrives at “Big eye”, the operatic 7-minute conclusion to the 3-act record. Over the uproar of jolting strums and strings, he claims that his word is his sword. To love with one’s whole heart, he discovers, is to “recreate it all, and forgive it all”.
What PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE truly is lands on this very line; elegant, soft, full of introspective meanderings, it offers its author a place to recreate and forgive, grieve and lavish. Poetry, for him, is a sword to slant every gasp of pain and suffering, and this record proves how much he’s devoted to it: metaphorical verses that mirror those of Kate Bush’s, draped in Björk’s eccentric, melodious production. Indeed, PARANOÏA isn’t without flaw; some tracks work more as spoken poems than as songs due to their slack, unmoving instrumentation. But at almost 100 minutes, Chris’ most astounding work yet expands his craftsmanship to territories surprisingly well-suited for him. He grips on to hope as angels do to their wings, and it’s unlikely that he’ll ever let go”.
I did want to spend some time with PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. I don’t think we will see another album this year as ambitious and wonderous. He played the album out as part of his headline set at the Meltdown Festival (which Christine and the Queens is curating). It sounded like this ritual and spiritual unleashing in front of a London crowd. The Guardian were mesmerised:
“This is going to get more dramatic than I anticipated,” Chris proclaims after his drummer showers him with roses midway through the show. But it’s hard to tell how much of the dialogue between songs is scripted in this two-hour rock opera dramatising Christine and the Queens’ latest album, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Sometimes it’s filled with monologues about pride, or St Michael’s sword, at others tongue-in-cheek jabs at the audience for getting up to pee during the “ritual”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Baker/Getty Images
That’s how Chris describes his headline show at Meltdown festival multiple times: a ritual. Much like the angels in Tony Kushner’s 1991 magnum opus Angels in America, on which the album is based, music is presented as a disruptive force – one with the power to terrify and transform. The play follows Prior Walter, a young man dying with Aids in late-80s New York as he’s visited by angels in a series of visions and prophetic dreams. The stage design tonight brings some of this imagery to the fore. Performing among Rodin-inspired sculptures, fragments of staircases and a line of wooden chairs arranged like a church pew, the band play feverishly, pushing the songs to their limit in lockstep as if the whole night is on the brink of collapse.
They run through the album in full, its three acts demarcated by outfit and the mood changes brought about by the force of Chris’s physicality. In the first act he rips across the stage in suit trousers and a single glove like Michael Jackson by way of ballet school, moving with the drums as though he is physically connected to the kit and elevating sprawling songs such as Track 10, which can fall slightly flat on record, into moments of transcendence. The second act starts suddenly with Chris in the middle of the crowd, weaving between the rows and taking audience members’ hands in his. In the final act he sings in gorgeous falsetto on his knees in a red baroque-era skirt, black blazer and white angel wings, which are shed one by one until he’s stripped back to his trousers, commanding the stage again for love-soaked synth-pop ballad Big Eye.
Gripping and at times utterly overwhelming, the performance is imbued with all the phantasmagoric drama of Kushner’s play and its unlikely happy ending. Abandoned by his partner and the world, Prior nevertheless fights to stay in it, asking the angels for “more life” in a battle cry of a final monologue – and receiving it. Speaking about its influence last month, Chris said, “Subconsciously I picked that play because I wanted to manifest that for myself.” Tonight, it was clear that he wants it for all of us.
Chris has created this mesmeric and emotional work. Hypnotic and genre-blending, I would encourage everyone to listen to this album. A far cry from a slicker and more easy-to-define debut, PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE is a creative and personal peak. Take some time out of your day to experience…
THIS astonishing album.