billie (FR)

She has a taste for encounters. billie, 22 years old, black bangs and a mischievous gaze, carries within her an English landscape infused with French sensitivity. It’s a curious blend – the fusion of rock and tender words, of earth and air, of restlessness and innocence. A longing for elsewhere that took flight early in childhood.

From the age of six, billie was singing and learning piano within her musical family. Nurtured by the dream pop of Cocteau Twins, the post-punk of Joy Division, and the experimental rock of The Velvet Underground, she also shaped her sensibility through the distinct voices of French icons like France Gall and Françoise Hardy. Watching Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads documentary, was a turning point for her – its freedom of tone, its strangeness, its rigor – all of it drew her in and guided her like a North Star.

By the end of her teenage years, billie knew exactly what she was chasing: a kind of music where the crystalline flow of her voice could meet the distorted guitars of her imagination. Feminine rock, riots in a French studio.

To prepare for that, she studied for two years at the American School of Modern Music, then escaped to England, where she honed her technique and collaborated with local musicians she met through a small ad on a forum. The rest of the time? She tamed her solitude and watched people live their lives in cafés. She also polished her English – while continuing to write songs in French.

Among them are the five tracks of her debut EP, J’avance. Songs of desire (Amy), melancholy (Ami imaginaire, Parle-moi parfois), and urgency (J’avance, La terre explose): pieces both intimate and generational, whose instrumental direction she developed in London alongside her partner Zacharie Berdugo (Ayrakaz), also a musician.

Back in France, billie completed the production with her childhood friends Clément and Adrien from the band Kids Return, with whom she shares a love for organic sounds, powerful vocal melodies, and soaring arrangements that flirt equally with rock, pop, and punk.

The result is an electric and assured musical debut – an adventurous take on French chanson, charged with a hint of British irreverence.

Here comes billie.