Audiopile Review: With no time wasted, Parisian pop oddball Helen Island returns exactly one year later since giving us the vapours with Last Liasse, once again aligning with Dutch imprint Knekelhuis. Still helmed by the semi-recluse Léopold Collin, not much has changed for his Helen Island guise this go around, though there does feel like a general reckoning occurring with the pop weirdo underground that this project is tangentially associated with. Tirzah, Voice Actor, ML Buch, Wetdogg, and Astrid Sonne have been reconfiguring genre tropes and inverting expectations, the rest of the world now beginning to catch on to these outsiders as the mainstream solidifies into a pile of homogenous slop indiscernible from data-scraping AI-dependent Spotify playlists. Predicted decades ago, pop will eat itself. Like the others mentioned, Collin does seem steeped in pop music’s past, but what makes this scrambles our frontal lobes is his deconstruction of those glossy surfaces into haunted new sonics, simultaneously giving the uncanny air of familiarity and the alien. Lacerated trip-hop bucks underneath looped string sections, synth-pop aesthetics are upturned with half-speed drum machines and foggy keys, slow-burning glassy guitars call from the depths of 4AD, and those vocals of Collin, breathy and cavernous, come off like Erika de Casier pitched up through a bootleged hyper-pop filter. You, too, will likely hear something from the past creeping through, but Helen Island is always front-facing. Top marks.

***

On the outskirts of the Parisian sprawl, we drift through the evening hush, our steps tracing the edges of a world half-lit.
The air crackles—charged, restless. Somewhere, we hear the city hums, a distant, roaring tide.
And there is this stranger, curious, starry-eyed, looking at us.
We stop, tilt our heads together, a faint smile :

I scream, you scream ! Everyday is a new *silence*
It was all paradoxical
Fullness in the crisis

Silence is priceless