The most popular video on Madeon’s YouTube channel, with almost 70 million views, is also one of the oldest. The try-hard earnestness of “Pop Culture” is characteristic of the golden age of OK Go videos and ill-advised Chris Brown covers; the camera stays locked in on a then-17-year-old Hugo Pierre Leclercq’s uncalloused fingers as they dance across a Novation Launchpad cued up with samples of 39 different pop songs. Within the first minute and without the aid of Google, I can discern snippets of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Kylie Minogue’s “Wow,” Gorillaz’s “DARE,” and, of course, some requisite Daft Punk. Leclerq carried this philosophy through to his debut album, 2015’s Adventure. Piled high with house pianos and side-chained synthesizers, it was the EDM equivalent of pancakes for dinner.
Victory, Leclerq’s triumphant-by-design return after seven years, may well represent the final frontier in French musical innovation. It’s as if he reprogrammed that trusty Launchpad with all of the most influential dance and electronic pop acts to come out of his home country in the last three decades—Air (“Lonely Space Age”), Phoenix (“Somebody Else”), Justice, M83, Thomas and Guy-Manuel—then started bashing it with a hammer. First track and lead single “Hi!” kicks off with a sound we’ve never heard on a Madeon record before: a distorted guitar, ostensibly played by a real human (Mikey Freedom Hart of Bleachers), though it’s hard to be entirely sure when all the synths sound like guitars and all the guitars kinda sound like synths. “We love it!”, cheers a rowdy throng of boys, harkening back to an immortal Peaches banger. A producer who has never shied away from le mauvais goût, Leclerq has found his lingua franca in electroclash. What’s more, he’s right on time.
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From there, Leclerq stomps the gas right through the chassis. Solder two different Human After All tracks together and you end up with “Car Crash Baby,” which is saved from self-conscious grittiness by a cartoonishly chipper vocoder outro. Leclercq dabbled in close-up magic as a teenager, and he can’t resist a bit of misdirection. The whiplash is palpable when, after the bad-boy posturing of “Hi!”, “Car Crash Baby,” and “Super Platinum,” “Dancing on Your Grave” cranks the M83 dial all the way up to “OneRepublic.” Where once he would’ve called up Bastille’s Dan Smith or Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos to provide the vocal flashbangs, Leclerq gets to show off his newfound belting range, and he swerves what we might expect from the few guests he does invite. Erick the Architect, of the loopy Brooklyn rap trio Flatbush Zombies, gets pitch-shifted into Victory’s very own Maxim Reality on “Super Platinum”; the slow-burning (by comparison) “Fire Away” tests Slayyyter’s restraint over a creeping new wave riff, finding a middle ground between the dead-eyed stare of Tiga’s “Sunglasses at Night” cover and the campy melodrama of the original.
