Chris
“I wanted to write an album that could give justice to being someone complex in the pop world,” the surging French star sometimes known as Héloïse Letissier tells Apple Music. “Pop music is so much recently about trying to simplify narratives, and I was trying to complexify mine. Christine is really me taking your shirt and talking to you really up close. I just want to make sure you actually meet me.” If you have not yet made his acquaintance, you are about to: his second album under the name Christine and the Queens takes his alter ego a step further with a bolder iteration named Chris. “The first album was born out of the frustration of being an aberration in society, because I was a young queer woman,” says the singer (who announced in August 2022 that he was gendering himself in the masculine). “The second was really born out of the aberration I was becoming, which was a powerful woman—being lustful and horny and sometimes angry, and craving for this will to just own everything a bit more and apologize a bit less.” While the new album, also named *Chris*, undoubtedly works as an exploration of identity and sexuality and power—and as self-aware performance art worthy of touchstones like David Bowie and Laurie Anderson—it is also a supremely danceable collection of synth-pop confections that never gets overwhelmed by its messages. “Doesn’t matter” makes something as heavy as questioning the existence of God feel weightless; “Girlfriend,” featuring LA producer/DJ Dâm-Funk, likewise aims for both the hips and the head. “I don’t feel like a girlfriend, but I’ll be your lover,” he says. “The song is basically me trying to steal a bit from the patriarchy. It’s purely empowering out of defiance and wittiness.” That flair for the dramatic comes naturally to this artist. “I wanted to be a stage director before I became a pop performer, and writing a record is kind of like staging a huge play in my head,” he says. “This is a mysterious job I have.”
The kinetic French singer Hélöise Letissier lets us into the whole of her life, creating an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid pop-funk.
When Christine And The Queens emerged with 2015’s self-titled effort, the album was a welcome antidote to sterile pop music. Héloïse Letissier, the French musician behind the project, wasn’t just a refreshingly honest songwriter. She was also a mesmerizing live performer who seemed to melt into rhythms and grooves—and…
This is a deft and mind-bogglingly intelligent record – a subversive pop masterpiece – that somehow sounds effortless, too
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Hélöise Letissier creates a polyglot pop that transcends gender, international borders and musical categories.
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Christine and the Queens' debut album, Chaleur Humaine, announced Chris as a heartfelt, eloquent artist and earned him a thriving following of listeners who felt he was singing directly to -- and for -- them.
A sparkling pop album that flourishes in both English and French, Chris is a supremely confident introduction to the next phase of Christine and the Queens.
If Christine and the Queens' first album, Chaleur Humaine, was a more subdued and introspective record, with Héloïse Letessier (aka Christin...
It’s no surprise that Héloïse Letissier, the queer singer-producer behind Christine and the Queens, is drawn to that decade.
After her surprise breakthrough in 2016, "Chaleur Humaine," Christine and the Queens auteur Héloïse Letissier witnessed for herself the inner workings of the music industry and suffice to say she didn’t like everything that she saw.
Héloïse Letissier has always struggled to define her identity. A French artist drawn to London’s drag scene, she started to blur the
In her new guise as the lustful Chris, Héloïse Letissier harnesses 80s funk to grapple with gender and identity on her ambitious second album
Christine And The Queens' second album 'Chris' is better than just a danceable Michael Jackson-sounding pop LP - it's a necessary one.
Unlike most ephemeral pop music today, Christine and the Queens's 'Chris' feels consequential and everlasting. Read our review.
It's comforting that Héloïse Letissier (known as Christine and the Queens) understands how to balance politics and pop music.
Christine and the Queens transform pop by respecting and slowly reworking its past in our review of the bilingually triumphant album 'Chris'
A swaggering masculine alter-ego delivers Letissier’s punchy statement of intent, wrapping themes from gender fluidity to female agency in heady electronic pop