Collating hard-to-find punk and new wave pop from end of ‘80s France (and french-speaking Belgium & Luxembourg), the 3rd and final of DINTE & World Gone Mad’s gallic mixtape series is puckered with particularly ripe examples of the sound that edge into the peripheries of indie pop’s turns toward dream-pop and shoegaze. The pull of prevailing anglo punk and US new wave precedents is apparent throughout, but always pulled back to french ‘floors with a motorik bent and sense of drama that soundtracked its teenaged dreams and beyond, and would likewise seep out into animation soundtracks that fed back into US, Canadian, Japanese and UK market via dubbed syndication.

All harvested from hard-to-find tapes and records, the set veers from strains of moody new wave with a gothic pallor at the front, turning to crabby cuts of darkwave mid-way down Face A, and what sounds like a demo from france’s answer to Siouxsie & The Banshees, before a 2nd side opens put from excellent find of percolated choral synth pads and byzantine jangle, to passages of high goth drama, bleak cold wave, and sinuous echoes of The Cure with an iron deficiency, thru to pre-echoes of the styles that likes of John Maus would mimic much farther down the line.