With the release of "Voyager" in 2017 - a fourth album that danced under disco balls, immersing us with delight in a disco version, synthetic and irresistible, cosmic and vitamin-packed, but updated to the taste of today's dancefloors - Vitalic confirmed his position as one of the most emblematic figures of the famous French Touch. A producer constantly challenging himself, capable of blending techno, rock, disco, pop and punk with equal energy, while leaving his mark on bodies and minds with hits such as "La Rock 01", "My Friend Dario", "Fade Away", "Under Your Sun", "Poison Lips", "Second Lives" and many more along the way. From the very start of his career, Vitalic has demonstrated his love of live electronic music, which he has established (alongside Etienne de Crécy, Daft Punk and Justice, for example) with his electrifying, psychedelic concerts, all digital pyrotechnics and laser battles, from which the audience emerges exhausted, as if after a frenzied chase.

Hyper-prolific since the release of his album "Voyager" and the long tour that accompanied it, Vitalic hasn't rested for all that. He has resurrected his Dima alias with which he first made a name for himself (and which already contained all the DNA of the future Vitalic), remixing everything from Etienne Daho pop to the angry techno of Louisahhh, forming the duo Kompromat with Rebeka Warrior (ex Sexy Sushi), a sublime tribute to EBM (for Electronic Body Music) sung in German and to the group D. And all this while celebrating his twenty-year career with a limited-edition vinyl box set, featuring his signature tracks and best remixes, which is now selling out at indecent prices. As if that weren't enough, Vitalic has also announced an exceptional anniversary show at the Accor Arena (formerly Bercy) on March 12, 2022.

Vitalic took advantage of this confinement and disrupted schedule to delve into his synthesizers and drum machines, announcing a fifth album, "DISSIDÆNCE", the title of which is already quite a program. The album, which he describes as a return to the roots of his sonic identity, in the form of a revisited nod to the rock energy of his early albums, will be released in two volumes: "Above all, it's a question of timing. When I was composing it, I realized that eight tracks seemed too few for an album and sixteen too many, so I decided to cut the whole thing in two! But the essential reason was that I felt I hadn't said everything on the first volume, like a feeling of unfinished business."

If the first part of "DISSIDÆNCE" opens with the track "Haute Definition" and its electro-mutant disco, which unconsciously makes the link with the sounds of "Voyager", the record quickly ventures into harder, techno territory, as Vitalic confirms: "I came back to a composition that was more raw than that of my last two albums, to a sound more marked by the 70s, so more direct and less smooth. I wanted something violent but still very sexy in the production." The proof is in the form of "Rave Against the System", the first single from the album, which kicks off the hostilities straight away with its martial beat designed for raves, its intertwining acid loops and its angry, repetitive vocals - "Rave Against the System, we won't stop, we can't stop" - chanted by an angry Kiddy Smile. An angry, violent hit which, with its punk-electro tones, sets the dominant tone for this new album. In other words, a plunge into hard, uncompromising techno, unleashed and physical, angry and sweaty, also found on tracks such as "Boomer OK", a humorous response from the forties to the twenties, with its infrabass and raging vocals that transform the track into a mental and physical mill, "Carbonized", with its crazy electronic gimmicks, its lyrics in the form of a settling of scores, its synthesized vocals and its energy that take us back with delight to the incredible "My Friend Dario" or the unforgettable "Cosmic Renegade", an irresistible dance machine in the form of a diabolical trance anthem reminiscent of Jam & Spoon hits and 90's German techno.

Logically, and as on every one of his albums, Vitalic also plays with our nerves and bodies, alternating between pure, physical dance tracks destined for huge warehouses and festival stages, and a whole collection of soothing, romantic, bucolic ballads as if to come back down again. Whether it's "Lost Time", a quasi-ambient track with an absent rhythm that seems to come straight out of the soundtrack of an imaginary film, the sublime "Danse Avec Moi", a perfect condensation of bouncy Elli & Jacno-style electro, which sums up all those love stories tied up at 4 a.m. in the middle of the dancefloor, or "14 AM", which starts like a tribute to Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" and then veers off into heady EBM-soaked electro.

Successfully acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, with flagship tracks such as the Eurodisco-flavored "Haute Definition" and the percussive "Rave Against the System", true high-energy condensations for gigantic dancefloors, "DISSIDÆNCE" is now enriched, as promised, by a second episode in the form of seven previously unreleased tracks, which will be offered as bonuses in a boxed set combining the two albums. DISSIDÆNCE Episode 2" was started by Vitalic at the end of the composition of the first volume. When I finished the first episode of "DISSIDÆNCE"," he explains, "I had a few sketches of tracks for another album, but when I listened to it, I realized that something was missing to make it more coherent, to make the two albums form a whole. The first is, to put it simply, more pop in a way, while the second is more industrial with a rave feel. It's more a collection of tracks, which I'd call functional, tracks to be played live or in a mix, and really designed for dancing. It was only when the two episodes were finished that I realized how much all these tracks express frustration, springing from what we'd been through during those two years, from confinements to bans on partying."

Indeed, "DISSIDÆNCE Episode 2" opens with "Sirens", with its screeching police sirens interrupting wild raves, before progressing into a dangerous, sweaty electronic tornado, giving way to "The Void", a perfect concentrate of minimal hardcore chanted with the heady "I belong to the Void", and shifting into a post-cold-wave tribute to Crash Course In Science (Vitalic's favorite band) on "The Light Is A Train".

The two episodes of "DISSIDÆNCE", which navigate between pop and hardcore, sweat and tenderness, melancholy and anger, are a kind of condensation of what the producer, with a twenty-year career under his belt, knows how to do best, from dirty tornado to unscrew your head on the dancefloor to loving, synthetic pop-song to escape to. DISSIDÆNCE", a two-volume opus that ultimately becomes one, oozes social and political anger at the current pandemic between its angry beats and running sequencers, and draws on Vitalic's past taste for synths that go off the rails, his past, but above all expresses his passionate obsession with dance music and the vital need to dance. "DISSIDÆNCE" can thus be listened to as both a hymn to celebration and a journey back to a time that no longer exists, but which - and this album is dazzling proof of this - is destined to live again with all its might, BPM on the run and rage intact, because, more than ever, "dancing = living".