Stream: Antoine93 “Maybe Unlock My Heart” (exclusive)

05 Dec 2014 — Henning Lahmann

In the times we live in, citing this woman as a major influence will hardly provoke outrage, yet ignoring the abundance of post-modernist ironic fad for a second, it probably makes a whole lot of sense for someone emerging from Montréal's infinte well of pop music talent. Dion's impact is, after all, hard to evade within Québec. So despite surely tongue-in-cheek, Antoine93 might well be sincere. And indeed, his debut Maybe Unlock My Heart is nothing but pop in its pure and shining gestalt – yet never timeless, agreeable, or in any other sense aiming at the top 40. Quite the contrary, what we have before us is a work that's knee-deep in contemporary post-Internet currents; a little vaporish here, some extravagant, heartbroken crooning there, the Montréal artist who wrote the majority of this piece while being based in Berlin Neukölln, is certainly aware of what's going on in the musical corner of the www. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. Unsure if we'll come back to Maybe Unlock My Heart in five years time for reasons other than revisiting the pinnacle of 2014's pop culture? Maybe not. In any case, it shouldn't bother us now. So stream the whole release in full below. Right now, we promise you won't regret it.

Maybe Unlock My Heart is out on cassette and digitally via Berlin's new imprint Mansions & Millions – which sets out to specialize on Montréal's new guard – next Friday, December 12.