With her new album, Égrégore, released this Friday, October 30, Mylène Farmer deploys all of her mythology to revisit her obsessions in light of contemporary anxieties. In a mode even more disenchanted than that of a generation ago, the singer invites us to find in collective action the strength to revolt.
With Mylène Farmer, the release of an album unfolds like a riddle, each clue seemingly inviting a new interpretation. Since the spring, the singer has thus orchestrated her return as a multi-episode serial, some installments of which may have unsettled even her fans.
First, “C’est à qui le tour,” a song with anxious lyrics whose dancing tones contrast with the darkness of its subject matter. Then, “Des lols et des quoi,” which sparked an unexpected controversy about its view of youth. Finally, on Wednesday, October 27, an event screening in more than 360 cinemas, allowing listeners to discover the thirteen songs of her new album, Égrégore, accompanied by clips and digital creations.
The Libertine Guiding the People
Behind a nearly light electro-pop production, the lyrics of “C’est à qui le tour,” the first single from Égrégore released on May 29, evoke fear, violence, and the difficulty of expressing oneself. A familiar contrast in the Farmer universe. But it is above all its video, entrusted to director Julia Ducournau, Palme d’Or for Titane, which gives the piece its full dimension. In a nocturnal and menacing Paris, Farmer traverses a world where bodies fall and mouths fade. She finds refuge in a queer club, before meeting her own doppelgänger, the Libertine of 1986. The filmmaker makes her obsessions dialogue with the singer’s: violence, desire, censorship, death, but also the shifting identities.
The second excerpt, “Des lols et des quoi,” gave rise to a misunderstanding. To a pop melody, Farmer summons Ronsard, the language of social networks, and the new expressions of youth. Some heard in it a reactionary critique of the impoverishment of the French language. But the video directed by Thierry and Didier Poiraud offers a far more mischievous reading: at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, overturning the codes of the heist film and dystopia, Mylène leads an operation aimed at freeing words from censorship. These two titles already sketch the contours of Égrégore, an album traversed by contemporary anxieties.
Four years after L’Emprise, a record with majestic orchestrations and an almost solemn darkness, Égrégore signals a shift in musical direction. For this thirteenth album, Mylène Farmer substantially refreshes her circle, entrusting a large portion of the compositions to DJ Lewis, alongside Antoine Chatenet and Ana Zimmer. The result favors a contemporary electro-pop, nourished by synthesizers and dancing rhythms, without giving up aerial ballads. DJ Snake participates on two tracks: “How Much for the Night” (Combien pour la nuit), aimed at dance floors and seduction, and “Sans amarres,” more melancholic. Moby, a longtime ally of the French artist, signs the music for “Recréer un jour” and “Plus d’écho,” which closes the album. The track also includes “Confession,” a homage to David Lynch performed by Mylène Farmer for the opening of the Cannes Festival in 2025.
Mylène Dalloway
To accompany Égrégore, Mylène Farmer conceived a musical film of a little over an hour, coordinated by François Hanss, her longtime collaborator. Five clips were entrusted to filmmakers: Julia Ducournau, Antonin Baudry, Gilles Lellouche, the Poiraud brothers, and Hanss himself. The other tracks are accompanied by digital creations. A move that continues the tradition of Laurent Boutonnat’s spectacular short films, but the result proves uneven.
For while the works of Ducournau and the Poirauds give a new dimension to the songs, some digital illustrations appeared less convincing. The October 27 screening, intended to offer fans a cinematic experience worthy of the venue’s special prize, sometimes resembled a sequence of disparate proposals. The use of artificial intelligence crystallized the essential questions, as much as the artist had built part of her legend on the singularity of her images. In 2025, having lent her voice to a troubling artificial intelligence in Dalloway, Yann Gozlan’s film, she called to “protect creators against impostors.”
The Égrégore or the Power of the Collective
To reduce this return to the reservations sparked by the cinema night would miss the point. For Égrégore deploys all that fans love about Mylène Farmer: her different voices, her characters, numerous references to her past lyrics, and the entire mythology of her forty-year career. But far from contenting herself with revisiting her repertoire, the singer pushes her obsessions further, in light of the anxieties of our era. Behind loneliness, the world’s violence, and disillusionment, a single question runs through the songs: how to find within oneself, and with others, the strength not to give in to despair?
In “Entendre ma voix,” Mylène asserts the need to first recover her own voice. To the darkness of the world, “Reste la lumière” opposes an identity that refuses to be erased. Further, “Recréer un jour” designates the human responsibility in the surrounding darkness, while a response emerges: “We always have a choice.” On the title track, her airy voice rests on deep basses and an electronic pulsation whose ternary motif recalls the opening of “Je te rends ton amour,” on Innamoramento (1999). There, a collective dimension adds to this search for strength. The album’s final sequence pushes this reflection to its most vertiginous consequences. “Déni” and “Confession” confront beings with their lies and their wounds, before “Dieu est mort” stages the collapse of beliefs, in relation to the silence of the Messiah. But the album does not end on this observation. Facing emptiness and loneliness, the singer calls in “Plus d’écho” for the moment when “the day opens within us.”
Borrowed from esoteric vocabulary, the word “égrégore” designates a collective force born from shared thoughts and emotions. An idea that also resonates with the relationship Mylène Farmer has maintained for forty years with her audience, notably LGBT+, whose each generation recognizes itself in her troubled characters and her taste for shifting identities. Her songs provoke contradictory interpretations, fans debate… in their own way, Égrégore indeed signs a work in which the public themselves participate in constructing meaning. From the Nietzschean observation that leaves humanity alone with its responsibility, to the strength of the bond with others to imagine a different future, her movement evokes Albert Camus’s famous line in The Rebel: “I revolt, therefore we are.”
