Billie

She has a taste for encounters. billie, 22 years old, black bangs and curly gaze, carries within her an English landscape doubled with French sensitivity. It’s a strange mix: the alloy of rock and tender words, of the telluric and the flight, of anxiety and candor. It’s a desire for elsewhere, which took off early in childhood.

From the age of 6, billie sings and learns piano from her musician family. Rocked by the dream pop of Cocteau Twins, the post-punk of Joy Division or the experimental rock of Velvet Underground, billie also shapes her sensitivity through contact with the unique voices of French icons, France Gall or Françoise Hardy. Watching Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads documentary, is decisive for her: this freedom of tone, this strangeness and this demand, all of that attracts and guides her, like a shepherd’s star.

In fact, from the end of adolescence, billie knows what she’s tracking: a music where the clear river of her voice would meet the saturated guitars of her imagination. Rock in the feminine, riots in a French studio. To prepare for all that, she studies for two years at the American School of Modern Music, then escapes to England where she refines her musical technique and works with local musicians, met following a small ad left on a forum. The rest of the time? She tames her solitude, and observes people living in cafes. She also perfects her English, while writing songs in French. Among them, the 5 tracks of her first EP J’avance. Songs of desire (Amy), melancholy (Ami imaginaire, Parle-moi parfois) and urgency (J’avance, La terre explose), tracks that are both intimate and generational, therefore, whose instrumental direction she refines in London with her boyfriend Zacharie Berdugo (Ayrakaz), also a musician.

Back in France, billie then finishes the production of the whole with her childhood friends Clément and Adrien, from the group Kids Return, with whom she shares a taste for organic sounds, but also for powerful vocal melodies, flights that rub shoulders as much with rock or pop as punk. In the end, all this gives an electric and mastered musical launch, an adventurous French song, struck with British irreverence. Here comes billie.