French visual artist Michele Bry has been piquing the curiosity of those lucky few that stumble across her songs for a few years now. Now, finally, the elusive character steps out from behind the silhouette of a cartoon rabbit to deliver a debut mixtape full of subtlety and style.

Stream: “cartoons and cereals” – Michele Bry

The first I heard of Michele Bry was her debut single “cartoons and cereals,” and immediately it struck me as something quietly novel.

There’s something gnarly in the riff and something Beastie in the beat. But the magic of the song comes from its lyrics that loop and loop a single phrase, a stylistic choice that’s popped up again and again in the run-up to Essentials Vol. 1.

I ask her what sparked this lyrical trademark and she recalls how it happened accidentally, when she sent her friends a demo of “cartoons and cereals” with makeshift vocals, telling them “I just haven’t written the lyrics yet!” The decision to keep it that way came as a little act of rebellion against writing lyrics “just to fill holes.” And besides, “Why could house music loop the same sentence over and over and a folk songwriter couldn’t?”

The result is genius! Something like Alex G’s Alina in its indescribable ability to evoke. We underestimate the power of the words until the beat steps back and the synths appear: it’s then that the tears sneak up on us.

She puts it best as she writes to me, “Words can take so many different shapes depending on the music that’s surrounding it.” In Bry’s hands, lonely clauses – such as “watching cartoons with cereals in the morning” or “longer days in the summer time” – contain many mouseholes of meaning and memory.

Posed with the question of what drew her to English (as opposed to her native French), Bry tells me that not only are English syllables easier to work with, but that her emotions are easier to distill in translation. The simplicity of the language also works in her favour: where specifics may inhibit emotional commitment to a song, these elementary phrases make them applicable to everyone, everywhere, everyday…

Originally from the subalpine countryside of Auvergne, Bry moved to Paris as soon as she left high school, and worked as a nanny and an illustrator before turning a hand to her musical endeavours. That’s not to say that Michele the musician and Michele the artist don’t coexist, in fact, Bry has been the brain behind her own iconic single covers, populated by the shapes of rabbits and green apples, retro telephones and shopping trolleys, all infinitely twee and pastel. She encourages us to consider the songs and their corresponding artworks in tandem, excited by the friction this creates. “Like having an uplifting song with dull, bittersweet visuals. Or sad music with fun visuals. I’m quite obsessed with the little spaces created in junctions like this. That’s where I find meaning most of the time,” she says.

A look at her visual art (airbrushed sundaes, fairground characters, and angel-baby designs for the likes of Marc Jacobs) shows the importance of nostalgia in her life and work.

“Did you know it used to be considered a pathological disease?” she’s keen to flag. This obsession saturates the music too, often underscored by a quietly sombre presence. Sometimes it’s a wistful breeze of layered bass guitar carrying long-gone scents of childhood. Other times it’s a frayed hole in the melody, exposing grazed knees and a minute of scratchy guitar.

“girl like me” gives itself up to this melancholia entirely. It’s got the feel of a muted kind of shoegaze, with a voice that tries to hide behind the noise of delinquent synths and bass riffs too tired to be loud enough. The repetition of “You’ll never want a girl like me” captures the tragedy of simultaneous resignation and resolve, knowing it will never happen, but thinking and thinking and thinking that it might.

Other tracks do look up, though. A personal favourite is “3+3,” the kind of sturdy song that gets you out of your bedroom and into the city. “It’s about everyday repetition,” she says, pointing out how easy it is to get from 10 to 3.33333333…

On the song, she recounts her daily commute “listening to Joni Mitchell and always almost being late for work,” and it feels like the intro to a beloved sit-com. There’s a smack of hope that our heroine might find her feet in the big city, amidst the hustle and bustle of an elastic bassline, Saint-Etienne-esque beat, staggering piano and the occasional baby scratch, buffing the production with a sense of humour akin to Loukeman or Haloplus+.

It chronicles the day-to-day of Paris, and finds wonder in the ordinary, since for Bry, “that’s where the imaginaire hides best.”

In this way, she’s grounded but slightly lunatic, sat cross-legged telling jokes to teddy-bears and watching old cartoons (she names Hannah Barbara’s Looney Tunes and Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit as favourites). “I guess I’ll keep my eyes on the doughnut instead of the hole,” she tells her diary on the intro to “j’adore,” a warm song of low-key loves that would feel at home on a playlist alongside bands like Snuggle. “golden why” is right there too, an affirmation of home that watches a parade of mini automobiles dance by beeping their horns.

With Essentials Vol. 1, Michele Bry has curated a collection of songs that resembles an assembly of sentimental objects.

Think ceramic dolls, Disney keychains and cocker spaniels, cluttering a drawer, a mantelpiece or a handbag, each one so tiny and yet so powerful. They add up to an amazing debut, compact and stylish like a pocket mirror that exposes the weakness of your smile and the wetness of your eyes, wet from happiness, heartsickness and homesickness all at once.

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:: stream/purchase Essentials Vol. 1 here ::

:: connect with Michele Bry here ::

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Connect to Michele Bry on
Bandcamp, Instagram

Discover new music on Atwood Magazine

 © Hélène Tchen Cardenas

Essentials Vol. 1

an album by Michele Bry