Album Review: Minuit Machine - Infrarouge (2019)

I think it was probably one of those “free” The Blog That Celebrates Itself compilation album downloads that first introduced me to the music of Minuit Machine. A 2015 tribute album to The Smiths, where Minuit Machine - aka Amandine Stioui and Helene De Thoury - took on the unenviable and potentially quite thankless task of covering ‘How Soon Is Now?’, a track so beloved by particularly fussy fans of The Smiths, the duo was always flirting with fire.

But they somehow managed to pull it off with no little amount of credibility still intact; walls of Numan-esque synths combined with ice cold femme fatale-style vocals miraculously reinventing the feted tune, to leave it with distinctly haunted goth-rock aftertaste. It was, for me, the standout track on an otherwise uninspiring and ordinary tribute album.

That same niche but immensely satisfying formula is applied again on Infrarouge, Minuit Machine’s third studio album, released on the Synth Religion label earlier this year. Slow-burning rhythms push hard up against layers of dark foreboding synth, only to then bounce off, yet still complement, the duo's richly melodramatic vocals.

Infrarouge is something of a comeback album for the duo, a belated follow-up, after a brief hiatus, to 2014’s Live & Destroy and 2015’s Violent Rains. I’m not sure how Stioui spent the intervening years, but De Thoury has been working hard to carve out a successful “solo” career (as Hante.) within similar darkwave, synthwave, and goth-rock realms.

There’s drama aplenty in both the words and music found on Infrarouge; frequently claustrophobic yet still very grand and beautiful tunes that deal with the complexities of modern life and human relationships. With titles like ‘Chaos’, ‘Empty Shell’, ‘Fear of Missing Out’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Forgive Me For My Sins’, and one of the best, ‘Drgs’ … “we are doomed to stay alone, drugs, I need something to fill me up, I need something to kill the rage, drugs, the world is ending but I don’t care, we all die but I don’t care”… (whoa, steady on! - Shiny Happy Ed)

There’s also a much-improved fleshed-out remastered version of ‘I Am A Boy’, which first appeared on the duo’s debut EP of 2013, Blue Moon.

De Thoury wrote the music and produced the album, and I believe she’s responsible for most, if not all, of those delicious towering synths, while Stioui wrote the album’s lyrics and takes care of the vocals.

At ten tracks across 43-odd minutes, Infrarouge is a terrific album, something of a masterclass within its genre, by 2019 standards at least, and as comebacks go, this one is way better than anyone could have anticipated. 

One of my favourite albums of the year so far. 

Here's 'Forgive Me For My Sins' ...