Charlotte Gainsbourg

The sounds of bird song, singing bowls and water rippling invite us to Peradam, which takes as its entry point René Daumal’s early 1930s novel Mount Analogue: a Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, in which the French writer, critic and poet mapped a metaphysical journey to “the ultimate symbolic mountain” in search of meaning. In it, Daumal introduced the idea of the “peradam”, a rare, crystalline stone – harbouring profound truths – that is only visible to seekers on a true spiritual path.

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first proper album since 2010, the upcoming Rest, doesn’t actually represent her first new music in that time—her 2011 set Stage Whisper included unreleased studio material from her sessions with Beck—but its first single builds enigmatically and beguilingly on the way her previous album, IRM, found romance in the void. “Rest” is also, fittingly, the first new Gainsbourg music since she starred in Lars Von Trier’s sensation-causing, sex-depicting 2013 film Nymphomaniac, for which she, with Beck again, breathily covered “Hey Joe.” There were hints of dance-tinged electro-pop on Stage Whisper numbers like “Terrible Angels” and “Paradisco,” so it makes sense that for this song she worked with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.