Too Much Fun to Feel Self-Conscious

Yelle operates in that narrow frequency where French electropop meets genuine strangeness and a refusal to slow down long enough to feel embarrassed about itself. La Musique leans into everything Julie Budet does best—her voice riding production that moves at the speed of a thought you can’t quite catch, the whole thing committed to its own momentum in a way that either feels joyful or exhausting depending on your tolerance for relentlessness. I find it joyful. French pop has always had a slightly recursive quality—songs about music, songs about dancing, songs about the feeling of songs—and Yelle commits to that tradition without irony, which turns out to be the only way it works.