Dominique A

When the idea for an album emerges, often I don’t see it coming. I move forward with two or three ideas in mind and am frequently surprised by what happens. For Spirales, things began one day in June 2024 during a walk in my hometown, Provins, in Seine-et-Marne. I had just crossed a public garden where, as a child, I often went with my mother. A text then appeared, telescoping those childhood walks with the moment I was living. I had already written songs about childhood, but the way the subject was approached here felt different, less laden with pathos. The resulting track, La roue du Jardin Garnier, thus set the tone for the record.

Until then I had taken song as a largely fictional terrain, with little autobiography; the previous studio album, Le monde réel (2022), spoke a lot about the times and ecology, at a certain remove. That day in Provins, I understood that I wanted to move back to the center of the game, celebrating epiphanies experienced in the places of my youth. Provins, then, and Nantes, mainly.

Provins, where friendships last: witness in particular the songs Un jour j'ai disparu and Évanoui, where, after decades of mutual silence, friendship resurfaces. The same with 39 rue Sainte‑Croix, where a return home brings memories and reunions together. Nantes appears in Picasso y los Simios, evoking a period— the mid‑1980s—through a band that remained local. Or in Mark, a tribute to Mark Long, the late singer of The Opposition, a band I idolized as a teenager, whom I had the chance to meet during a shared concert on a Nantes stage.

Other places run through the album’s songs, such as La rue des Flandres, where a walk through a northern town also takes on an epiphanic character, with an attempt to transcribe the unfolding of a thought in real time; similarly in La brique orange, itself born of a nocturnal walk on a Normandy beach. Another epiphany, but this time a romantic one, with Apparaître sur le quai, where the sight of the woman I loved clears a mental landscape that had been confused until then. To tell one’s story does not mean that the rest of the world does not exist. Bromure and Coltan thus came up during the writing process—theme songs, the first on the virility of power, the second on the price of our digital addictions. The particular and the universal also meet on Shining à 12 ans, an evocation of a childhood trauma mixed with a contemporary observation about screens.

And the music, where does that fit in? In keeping with the texts, it is earthier and more embodied, with the electric guitar back in the foreground. Is it because I plunged back into my youth, re‑listening to certain indie pop‑rock records from the late 1980s and early 1990s? Undoubtedly. It is also a way of giving a little asperity and roughness to this introspective return. Being on tour as a trio during the writing period also influenced things, reinforcing the desire to inject the intensity of live performance into the recording: alongside my two comrades Sébastien Boisseau (double bass) and Julien Noël (keyboards) was added Étienne Bonhomme (drums), all of whom had already been present on the previous studio album. We arranged the songs together. I like to think that the coming together of our four musical worlds, with our many references—from English and French new wave to contemporary jazz, from seventies pop to the motorik sound inherited from the German scene of the 1970s—seeps into our shared sound. An organic sound, where the joy of playing and the determination not to smooth everything over digitally are decisive.

To capture that sound, I returned to my roots in the Nantes suburbs, which made sense given the initial project: the Garage Hermétique, where, 35 years earlier, I mixed my first album, La fossette. The studio has since been expanded, and Pierre Le Gac now oversees all the recordings and mixes for the album.

In the song La terre à personne, there is talk of spirals. When the word came to me it struck me. In geometry, in the singular, it denotes a plane curve describing revolutions around a fixed point while moving away from it. I thought it could be a possible metaphor for what is at work in songwriting. All the more so for songs centered on memories that, like any respectable memory, tend to elude you.

Dominique A was born on 6 October 1968 in Provins (77), where he spent his childhood and adolescence until moving to Nantes at the age of 15. Spirales is his new studio album (16 tracks) and the 15th in his discography: a rawer, more rock energy and aesthetic, with songs whose lyrics are autobiographical, universal and topical. Released on 9 October 2026 on the Cinq7 / Wagram Music label. On tour throughout France from February 2027, at La Cigale (Paris) on 24 March 2027.