L’Impératrice releases new album 'Pulsar' | out 07/06

L’Impératrice has given riveting performances at some of the biggest festivals in the U.S. including Coachella, Outside Lands and Austin City Limits, and has a quickly expanding fanbase that propelled their upcoming fall tour to sell over 30,000 tickets in less than 3 days. Today, the quickly rising six-piece Parisian group – who is set to return to the U.S. this month for two sold out NYC shows and return performances at Coachella – is thrilled to announce their third full length album, Pulsar, due June 7th via Microqlima. Throughout the album, they move freely and authoritatively among the sounds they love, bridging hip-hop, kosmische, and modern pop with their most unabashed embraces of French Touch and international house ever. The album is also their first to feature guest vocalists who include folk/pop singer Maggie Rogers and rapper / producer Erick the Architect, among others.

Pulsar is a record where L’Impératrice made every decision, a set of songs that truly captured the band’s spirit both onstage and off. The self-produced album radiates the energy and wisdom of a band that has helmed so many dance parties around the world on the way to finding itself and its sound. Throughout, vocalist Flore Benguigui boldly sings of self-empowerment, or of shirking beauty standards, ageism, and drab normalcy. These are apt messages for these incandescent anthems of experience, of being yourself instead of anyone else’s version of it.

While writing the album, L’Impératice also tried a novel approach – splitting into two teams of ever-interchanging members to explore new ideas, led by the band’s founder Charles de Boisseguin. It was a way of incorporating every voice into writing like never before, pulling from idiosyncratic upbringings and enthusiasms. They then passed the tracks to Benguigui, a longtime jazz singer who would sometimes write two-dozen vocal melodies for a song just to see which one fit best. It was an arduous and exciting process and saw the band go from writing through to recording the album in about nine months. This was the sort of self-determination they’d wanted and now found.

By confronting other languages, other perspectives and other territories, and with pleasure as their only compass, Pulsar is the jubilant testament of a band with plenty to say and the skills to say it themselves.