A child of the internet with a look straight out of a video game, Théa, a hyperpop phenomenon, releases this Friday, October 2, her debut album, Popstar Speedrun, as brutal as it is exhilarating.
A boom-boom that blasts our ears with a pop soundtrack pulling a thousand miles an hour, Théa’s work is immediately recognizable. At 25, the singer doesn’t stay still, as evidenced by the title of her debut album, Popstar Speedrun. In stores this Friday, October 2, it follows the 2023 album Memento and the EP Comète, released in March 2025. Since then, the artist has been touring: from La Boule Noire to a full Olympia in April and a Zenith announced for March 2027. It is in a label’s office that we meet the artist, buzzing with enthusiasm for the imminent release of her project.
Hard to pin a label on the music of this internet-born kid who started making her tracks on GarageBand at 11 while posting covers on YouTube. “I like making noise, and I like it when the melodies go as fast as possible on the most pop possible tunes. I don’t deny myself anything as an artistic stance. I’ve also listened to Sum41 as much as Evanescence or Lady Gaga”, she laughs. Hyperpop, emocore, rap, metal, rave, punk… The result runs on BPMs, guitar riffs, and explosive productions. Popstar Speedrun confirms what Théa breathes into her early sounds: the sense of living with the urgency gauge always in the red.
“I see Théa as a character, something out of a video game”
Thea’s project truly crystallized after the lockdown, when she began performing in squats, with associations and anti-capitalist collectives. And while this debut album turns the volume up in the face of the world’s collapse, the lyrics, themselves, do not avert their eyes. Mental health, alcohol, drugs, violence, relationship to the body, political and climatic future. Théa states it, “[her] intimate disorders are the symptoms of the world in which [she] is growing up”.
She looks at her friends, their brains “crammed by Internet” and their self-destructive behaviors in light of a broader horizon: a queer and marginalized youth compelled to build themselves within a violent system, on a overheated planet, while reactionary discourses gain ground. The party is then less a fuite than a response. In “Cavale ! Cavale !”, her “black cats, witches and hardcore angels” are “uncomfortable in [their] bodies”, but still dance.
Through her artistic alter ego, Théa plays with her femininity and her appearance. “I see Théa as a character, something out of a video game”, she declares. Tattoos, piercings, pink hair or platinum blond, silhouettes sometimes feminine, sometimes masculine, as many “skins” with which to play. “Without Théa, I don’t know if I would have found the confidence to carry this eccentricity in which I feel so good.”
In this bricolage of self, Théa draws inspiration from figures that completely escape the male gaze, such as Rebeka Warrior, whom she discovered in high school with Sexy Sushi before following her other projects. “She’s a rockstar, she’s independent, she does what she wants. She’s also one of the first queer figures I’ve seen at that level.” Their meeting leads to “LÉTAL”, which the duo built after three hours talking about their lives over coffee. More than a prestigious feature, the song arranges a strange transmission between two generations who reach the same conclusion: aging does not necessarily provide the instruction manual.
For a long time, Théa insisted that people talk about her music before talking about her trans identity. Until she realized that keeping the two at a distance ended up restraining her writing as well. If she does not make it the album’s subject, she knows that her identity necessarily shapes what she tells since it shapes what she lives. “That’s part of my life. I would never have written ‘Celles qui die’ if I weren’t trans”, she says. A song in which she expresses deep distress and excavates the memories of a teenage girl plagued by guilt who struggles to find her place.
Popstar Speedrun also marks the moment Théa decides to blow up the last barriers between life and songs. In Bodybag, she talks about dysphoria without false modesty and the impact of her fame on her self-perception. “I want this to work,” she concedes. But to what extent am I willing to go in an industry I find rotten? And then I tell myself again: ‘Well, you wanted people to see your face everywhere, well done, but that doesn’t solve your dysphoria.’ Now, what do I do with that?” Her family, her severed bond with her mother, what might have stayed off-screen becomes material to write as well. Théa is precisely wary of where writing begins to self-censor: “When you try to block yourself, when you’re afraid to tackle a subject because it’s too hard, because it speaks of a loved one, it’s often a sign that there’s something interesting to dig into.”
