"It's dead to me," Christine and the Queens says of the classic pop song structure. "They killed pop music with high capitalism. They infected the melody."
The artist born Héloïse Letissier has always had a flair for the avant garde, pushing boundaries and exploring themes of identity in his music. (On "iT," the opening track of his 2014 debut album, he memorably sang, "She wants to be a man, a man/ But she lies/ She wants to be born again, again/ But she'll lose/ She draws her own crotch by herself/ But she'll lose because it's a fake.")
But PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, his fourth full-length due out June 9 via Because Music, is a different beast altogether — both a departure from the synthpop-drenched albums that came before it and an immaculate expansion of his uninhibited songwriting.
The passion project — a concept album in three parts, heavily inspired by Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning 1991 play Angels in America and the 2019 death of his mother, Martine Letissier — is an operatic tour de force eschewing traditional pop for a sprawling, visionary quest told over 20 tracks and 96 minutes. The elysian result is rich and revelatory at times, heady and hypnotic at others.
PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE also represents a complete evolution from the version of Letissier who emerged as a promising star in the indie pop sphere nearly a decade ago. "It changed me. It did," Letissier says of the album. "I'm in therapy now and I gender myself right. I'm present. [Laughs.] Finally, oh my god! It took the time it took, huh?"
If his candid thoughts are any indication, Letissier's journey of self-discovery has been a long and winding one. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that the French singer is an entirely different artist from the queer female pop star introduced on 2014's Chaleur humaine (which received an English language re-release the following year as Christine and the Queens). Back then, Letissier self-identified as a woman and was using she/her pronouns — aligning with the feminine moniker in his stage name — and was presenting Christine's androgyny as something of a performance-art spectacle through early songs like the above-mentioned "iT," "Saint Claude," and "Tilted."
For Chris, his 2018 follow-up, Letissier introduced another layer to his stage name and persona. As the titular Chris, the singer chopped his hair off into a slick pompadour and donned a rotating wardrobe full of button-down shirts, wide-legged trousers, and expertly tailored suiting.
"Every masculine hero narrative I could find I wanted to steal for myself and twist to my size," Letissier said in a profile for The New York Times at the time. "The first album was about a young, queer girl who was a bit melancholic, but now I'm flexing my muscles. I wanted to experiment with a tougher, more aggressive sound."
That approach yielded machismo-filled hits like the funk-driven "Girlfriend" (and its West Side Story-esque music video), and album opener "Comme Si," on which Chris declares, "There's a pride in my singing/ The thickness of a new skin/ I am done with belonging."
At the time, Letissier had begun publicly identifying as both pansexual and genderqueer while still maintaining a grasp on his female sex assigned at birth. "I'm saying that I'm fluid because I do believe that my femininity is made of, you know, hints of masculinity and made out of doubt and hesitations," he told BBC Newsnight. "I'm not so sure of what it means to be a woman even though I am one…I'm just trying to deconstruct a bit, because I think at some point tropes of gender felt a bit narrow to me."
Just a few years later, Letissier would, in fact, adopt an expanded array of pronouns, including they/them, on his journey toward fuller self-realization. But in hindsight, he still views his first two albums as honest representations of who and where he was in each particular moment.
"I think I understand more of what I want to become," Chris tells GRAMMY.com. "I started very young; my first album became massive young. I think Chris is also the expression [of the] stretching of my nerves, but I was still thinking in terms of, like, a pop structure, a woman's body, and I was taming the rest down."
In the earliest days of the 2020 pandemic, Letissier went on to release La vita nuova, an emotive EP anchored by lead single "People I've been sad," and a corresponding short film set to its six songs. The six-track release kept Chris' theatricality and choreography in the forefront — the visual for "People I've been sad" finds him dancing with a horned demon on a Parisian rooftop with the Eiffel Tour in sight — but found him exploring new depths of emotion in the immediate wake of losing his beloved mother.
"There was a real sense of unraveling that was quite present. It's true," he told NME of channeling his grief into La vita nuova. [The EP] was the result of receiving a lot of emotional short punches in my face during 2019…I experienced a lot of deep things while touring the second record, and the tension between the tour and the rest of my life crumbling apart became unbearable."
Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), the multi-hyphenate's next full-length, arrived in late 2022 as the vehicle to debut his latest alter ego, Redcar. And though the album's title pointed to it being a predecessor for what would come next, Letissier reveals that he was already deep into the process of creating PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE when he was struck with the idea that the heavenly triptych needed a French-language precursor.
"It felt like a prologue that I would need first to step back into the other piece," he says of Redcar, which he wrote and recorded in just two weeks with co-producer Mike Dean. "So it was like this corridor of a Kubrick movie where time is f—ed, and you actually have to work on something after the core to perform before the core."
It was embracing the Redcar moniker — inspired by seeing red car after red car on the streets of Los Angeles in the wake of his mother's death — that also gave Letissier the space to embrace his identity as a trans man.
He detailed his coming out and evolving relationship to gender in a Vogue profile upon Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)'s release last November. "My approach to transness is not especially going to be pleasing or reassuring, since I don't believe I should comfort anyone with any type of passing.
"My story is about tolerance and collective deconstruction," he continued. "I want to keep my body as it is. I am coming out to be happy and free, to be loved and to love, to enjoy my flesh and its contradiction, to help expand everyone's consciousness — by slowly, I hope, for future generations too, uprooting this binary, capitalistic approach to human life…Redcar is the depiction of what I've been going through."
And if (prologue) was a glimpse into Letissier's artistic and personal transformation, its successor unfurls the rest of his story in all its seraphic splendor.
"Through the light, remember. Hear, my baby. Welcome to the tale of tales. Welcome to the tale of your own light, my child. Welcome to the light," Letissier pronounces on the bombastic "Overture" that opens PARANOÏA. "From where I stand, everything is glorious."
With that proclamation, the artist makes clear he has, indeed, thrown the typical pop rulebook out the window and isn't interested in looking back. "I feel like the hyper-rationalization of efficiency in pop music is, a bit, killing the fun," he says. "We are working very narrow scales, very same intervals. We are searching for efficiency, and I wanted to search for truth, quoi."
The result is 96 minutes of gorgeously dense, powerful music that somehow manages to be simultaneously grandiose and intricate in both its construction and its performance. Chris layers medieval harmonies over ethereal, dreamlike soundscapes — welcoming heavenly visitations and contemplating on the invisible, as he processes grief over his mother's death and quests for transcendence in service to what "the invisible" demanded of him.
Madonna — whom he reverentially refers to as both "Metatron, quoi" and "the angel of transformation" — plays a key role on multiple tracks as an omniscient, ambivalent character termed the One Big Eye.
Looming over the album's high-minded narrative, Letissier describes Madonna's One Big Eye as either "the voice of the big simulation," "an angel in disguise," possibly the voice of his own late mother "speaking from afar" or even the Holy Mary herself — or better yet, all of them at once. (070 Shake also embodies her own angelic character on ANGELS songs "True love" and "Let me touch you once.")
According to Letissier, such an extreme creative process was unlike anything he'd experienced before, and being pushed to the brink left him questioning, at times, both his practice as a musician and his capacity to act as a vessel for the music he was receiving.
"I remember at some point, being so lost in the voices I had and the possibilities that I was like, 'I could also very much be insane,'" he says with a wry grin. "And I asked, actually, a shaman, I was like, 'Am I actually getting clearer? Or am I just bats–t insane?' She was like, 'Both, my good sir. Because the multiverse is real.'"
Soon enough, songs like "Tears can be so soft," "He's been shining for ever, my son" and "To be honest" were born, often written in a single take early in the morning, arriving in a bolt of inspiration. Looking back now, Letissier says the experience turned him into "the crazy praying man," singularly devoted to what became a near-spiritual practice. "I've never internalized my practice so much. I became insane. I was, like, possessed. I de-socialized. Was praying for hours, walking. The craziest things were happening to me, but very tenuous, very in the fabric of my day and I was alone praying.
"And the crazy thing about this artistry of ours, I think that we have to be brave most of the time," he continues. "Much more than even skilled, we have to be brave. Relentless. Patient. Enduring. More than even flagging the talents we have."
Thankfully, the singer says his rabid devotion to creating PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE led him to a kind of healing and brought him closer to the spirit of his mother.
"It was a terrifying but gorgeous feast. It felt haunted," he confesses. "But beyond that, it felt blessed. It felt like I was remembering her voice sometimes through mine. I almost felt like she has a touch on the songs themselves. There's a song called 'I met an angel.' When I wrote it, it says, 'Open your heart, my love' et tu. I was like, 'She's speaking. She's just telling me it's OK to be me and just be that musician. That man.'
"Losing someone you adore is a terrible experience of course, of pain, et tu," Letissier adds. "But what's great about love when it's so deep, is that she found a way to take care of me through magic. I believe that, I'm not afraid to even say I speak to her almost every day. I feel like when I understood more about myself, she was calling me 'my son.' You know, I feel like it's...you never break the bond."
Now on the verge of sharing PARANOïA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE with the world, Letissier has not only arrived at his truest self, but also sees just how necessary every step, every song and every album was to get him to this point.
"The good thing about me is that I am such a consistent man," he says. "I've been honest the whole time. The great thing that saved my ass in therapy from self-loathing — about realizing how blind I was to my condition — was the music has been there the whole time saying it. I've been an honest mother-lover in my practice. My big mistake was to tell people it was a performance."
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