Left-field French-language popular music is full of dynamic duos. From ye-ye mainstay Sylvie Vartan’s collaborations with then-husband Johnny Hallyday to arch-experimentalists Brigitte Fontaine and Areski, via Catherine Ribeiro’s work with Patrice Moullet and Serge Gainsbourg’s hook-ups with anyone and everyone, Francophone double-acts have been a source of much great music, both mainstream and underground, for the last sixty years. Amarante-Cerisier’s debut – and, if you believe their spiel, only – album is a fitting addition to the canon.
As well as being a musician and singer, Marine Debilly Cerisier is a dancer, writer and all-round catalyst of the underground music scenes in Brussels and Marseille, while Mauricio Amarante makes a living in French-Argentine tango doom act Radikal Satan. As a pair, their closest antecedent is probably the work of Fontaine and Areski. The songwriting is best described as a kind of free-form folk, with Amarante providing guitar, percussion and the odd psychedelic keyboard swirl, and Cerisier singing and playing the cajón. And as slight as that might sound, the results are lovely.
There is a haunting and abstracted quality to everything here, from the insistent bone-dry strums, slowly accumulating drone and incantatory vocals of Parfois to the breathy, wraithlike nursery rhyme folk of Silence, where Cerisier’s multi-tracked and half-whispered vocals create an alluring, treacherous web. Silence is something of a theme. The first line of the gorgeous opening track L’Avenir is ‘Le silence est parlent.’ Silence speaks volumes. A claim like that on an album whose songs are written by an accomplished writer and poet dares us to think in terms of paradox, and the tension created by that paradox is part of the album’s air of fruitful mystery.
Les Parents proceeds at a languid pace, guided by a quietly exploratory acoustic guitar, finding its feet with Cerisier’s softly insistent singing, before undergoing a subtly, lightly psychedelic reinvention halfway through. L’Oubli sees Cerisier inject some more drama into her vocals, taking on the role of chansonnière more fully here than elsewhere, and Le Vent, le Sang gets its own sense of drama from an uncharacteristically driving rhythm and Amarante’s ringing, minimal guitar motif. Bien plus grand begins melancholic and melodic, like a less mannered Emmanuelle Parrenin, before finding a strange, almost primal rhythmic groove, and closer Telle une rose fires us right back into Brigitte Fontaine territory: echoey avant-folk-pop with an unorthodox but nagging melody.
Amarante-Cerisier is the first release in over a year from Brussels-based boutique label Okraina. Their output may be scant, but their quality control is always of the highest order, and this is no exception: if this is the only Amarante-Cerisier album we ever get, it will stand as a compelling artefact for those lucky enough to hear it. A deceptive, refractive collection of sweet, sharp songs.
Amarante-Cerisier (March 6th, 2026) Okraina Records
Order via: https://okrainarecords.bandcamp.com/album/amarante-cerisier
Honest Jons (Vinyl): https://www.honestjons.com/shop/artist/Amarante-Cerisier/release/Amarante-Cerisier