What you immediately notice when looking at the tracklist: twelve songs in 30 minutes. Melody Prochet, French indie pop star with a worldwide network, is focusing. Their previous albums offered long pop-psychedelia trips, many songs took extra laps, some unnecessarily, others with terrific results.
With UNCLOUDED she doesn’t change the sound: bass and drums still sound like they’re from the 70s, the guitars are wound, strings and synths open up the sound spaces. The big difference: Only one song is longer than three minutes, some pieces like “Flowers Turn Into Gold” end after a verse and a chorus. Optimized for streaming? Probably not, UNLCOUDED sounds far too much like the era of record players and patchouli.
The album title gives the decisive clue: Away from the cloudy, full concentration on what is necessary. It takes a while, but from the third round onwards the trick works: the flow emerges through the whole thing, held together by the sweet vocals and melodies of Melody Prochet and the as usual brilliant guitars of the Swedish musician Reine Fiske. The great finale: “Daisy”, developed with Leon Michels, namesake of the cinematic soul collective El Michels Affair.
This review appears in Musikexpress 1/2026.