Jonathan Personne Charts a Majestic Power Pop Course on 'Nouveau Monde'
Exclaim! Staff Picks
BY Alex Hudson Published Mar 14, 2025
Nouveau Monde mixes together unreleased songs from different eras of Jonathan Personne's writing, and a press release even goes so far as to say it has a "mixtape" structure with "naïve" arrangements and spontaneous "bedroom" production.
He's underselling it. Nouveau Monde is a pristine, majestic pop album that's not too far removed from last year's Mimi, the songwriter's excellent 2024 album with his main project Corridor. With honeyed "ba ba" hooks at every turn, the nine-song set stitches together churning dream pop on "Nuage noir," lumbering rock riffs on "Le cerf," Pet Sounds orchestrations on "Nouveau monde," spiky stabs of power pop on "La vie, la mort," and easygoing folk flourishes on "Zoé sur la montage."
It all comes together on "Duxième vie" and "Les arbes tombent," as sunny acoustic ditties are overlaid with squalling feedback and guitar abstractions. He might see it as a low-stakes project compared to Mimi, but that just shows how refined his songcraft has gotten.
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