Johnny Beth, anatomy of a rebellion

Paris, early 2000s. Camille Berthomier, a teenager fleeing Poitiers, takes a train to see her first concert: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Years later, that girl will remember that singer Karen O 'blew my mind, she was so free, she wiggled wildly like Iggy'. After that experience, under the stage name Jehnny Beth, Berthomier acted in a dozen films, directed the short film 'Stranger', started first the duo John and Jehn and then the wonderful all-female postpunk band Savages. The band has released two albums in which power, theatricality, the darkness of Bauhaus, the interlocking sounds of Wire and a visceral intensity vie for flashes of dazzling brilliance. After six years the Savages put the band on hiatus to focus on the individual projects of the four, so Beth collaborated with a variety of artists, including Gorillaz and Bobby Gillespie, and in 2020 made her solo debut with the intense and eclectic 'To Love Is to Live'.

The French artist's second solo album was born out of an authentic and fierce urgency. After years of projects and collaborations, Jehnny Beth feels the need to return to the essence, to a visceral punk energy similar to that of the Savages. The inspiration came in September 2023 during Queens of the Stone Age's North American dates, who chose her as one of the opening acts on their tour. The album took shape in a few months in the studio she shared with her partner Johnny Hostile, a total artistic laboratory. Following a manifesto of twenty creative rules, each track comes from immediacy and is dropped if it bores even one of them. The result is a dense, raw record built on fierce guitars and liberating screams. The title comes from an inscription seen on a car, 'You, heartbreaker, just you': powerful and human, just like the music itself. For Beth, rock is not dead, it is still the language of rebellion, capable of expressing pain, love and contradiction without compromise.

'You Heartbreaker, You' is a record that hits the gut, made of anger, tenderness and awareness. 'Broken Rib' opens with a cry that immediately declares the cathartic intent of the work: to transform personal brokenness into creative energy. It's a powerful rock track that blurs into industrial and takes only forty seconds to set the record straight. "No Good For People" is disarmingly saturated and charged with a deflagrating beat: "You haven't found a way to kill me yet..." sings Beth. "Out Of My Reach" is a hallucinatory ballad anticipated by "Obsession", in whose arabesque atmosphere Massive Attack can be glimpsed. The broken glass at the beginning of "I Still Believe" recalls the same violence released in the industrial stoner of "Reality". Beth is disturbing and dangerous both when she whispers in our ear, as in the excruciating "High Resolution Sadness", and in the moments when her voice is distorted, as in "I See Your Pain", which closes a powerful and asphyxiating album. An album in which, although lacking the air that characterised the Savages' sound, one is overwhelmed by the power of music and words.