music moots with Amira Mercury ("tous les mêmes" by Stromae)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we've got Amira Mercury! Part of the Manchester, UK-based collective Different Kind of Dough, Amira recently released "Patterns (in the sky)", a very chill alt-pop tune about the unchill time of peak Covid.
Amira Mercury
Pairing references to pandemic protocols ("keep your distance") and bedroom dance parties ("turn up the pretty lights and I think we'll be alright") with a dreamy instrumental, "Patterns" captures the strange feeling I had with my own Covid lockdown, with total alienation and newborn community somehow existing on the same plane. The future was uncertain, but every Friday night for three months straight, a group of us got together on Zoom to shoot the shit (and once watched the movie Jeepers Creepers) and try to stave off a total freakout for a little while longer.
Oh and LOVE the reference to the Subaru Crosstrek, the compact crossover SUV that is absolutely worthy of a mention in the chorus of a bedroom pop song.
Amira recommended any song by the Belgian musician Stromae: "He has been one of my biggest inspirations since I was a teenager. I really admire everything he does. His singing voice is amazing, his wordplay when he raps, his production and overall artistic vision is so so so powerful. I recommend listening to anything made by him but especially 'Tous les Mêmes' or 'Papaoutai.' Make sure you watch the music videos for those as well if you want to watch some seriously inspiring visual and artistic concepts. I really cannot recommend his music enough. Love love love him!!!"
Stromae...Yes, I should get more into Stromae. The only song I know from him is "Alors on danse," the song from 2009 that, along with "Mr. Saxobeat" and "Calabria 2007," made my college dance floor experiences CHOCK FULL OF SAXOPHONE. Fuck, the saxophone is cool. Sax-a make her dance. Anyway, I decided to cue up "tous les mêmes"...
This song is from 2013 and I believe you could categorize it in the genre of "electro swing." This is a genre that has maybe fallen off relative to its heyday in the early 2010s—we could place peak eagerness for electro swing around the time of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, a movie I somehow find underrated even though it made $350M at the box office. And then for a while I feel like people avoided adding brass instruments to their dance pop music. Which, fair, everything in music is cyclical and you can't have music sound fresh without other music sounding stagnant...
...but I'm hearing this with fresh ears now and thinking: so fun! We used to have fun, sometimes, in the 2010s! My friend Giao just shared with me a très millennial post, waxing nostalgic about going out to your hometown bars the night before Thanksgiving...and all of a sudden "tous les mêmes" is making me think of the concept of putting on a blazer and a lot of black eyeliner / mascara and going to the club. That little touch of formality—in the form of a jazz band sneaking into your EDM, in the form of your nighttime outfit having lapels or buttons—that I think made at least the early 2010s special in its own effortful way.
There's a newish song with lots of brass and general old-school appeal that I feel like would have slapped in the early 2010s and I'm super psyched it launched in 2025, because it means we maybe could return to this level of sophisticated-yet-tawdry party music again: Raye's "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" Released in September, finally getting some juice on the hot 100, might end up being one of my big faves of the year.
Also, the choreography in the "tous les mêmes" video, in which Stromae and friends put their arms in the shape of parabolas and swing them to and fro, looks so damn satisfying. I love when dance moves match the music perfectly—such artful flapping is exactly what you would want to do with your arms to "tous les mêmes."
Thank you Amira! Check out the "Patterns (in the sky)" video below and follow Different Kind of Dough for updates on the collective.
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