[A feature to be found in the winter issue of têtu·, available at your newsstands or delivered to you by subscription.] Four years after shaking up the French pop scene with Gamma Rays, P.R2B returns to wake us up with Almost Punk, a second album by an alchemist who turns anger into joy.
Photography: Yedihael for têtu·
One Monday morning, 10 a.m., at La Mutinerie. The Parisian bar draws a breath after the night, the activist stickers stuck to the walls shout in silence under a stark light that does not forgive sweaty memories. P.R2B pushes the door as if she were coming home. Wool sweater, cheeks flushed by the cold and then, two minutes later, she’s in a black T-shirt that reads “Fuck You” under a leather jacket. Instantaneous dyke-mode. “I don’t recall ever seeing daylight here… except the dawn’s light,” she jokes, glancing around the room. The mood is café crème and chouquettes, yet we’ve come to talk about Almost Punk, her second album released on December 5. A vibrant record she wrote far from the Parisian racket, in the Cévennes, where she fled the cityscape illusion marketed to us as the queer Eldorado.
Leaving Paris…
After the release, in 2021, of Gamma Rays, her first hybrid album that sat somewhere between cinematic pop, punk pulsations and scratched whispers, the singer could have anchored herself in the capital to manage her career up close to the scenes. She did exactly the opposite. She left. Far. “After the tour, I stayed a little in Paris, but I felt a loss of meaning… I had spent far too much time in the studio or in a room. Like an internal confinement”, she remembers.
Pauline – Rambeau de Baralon (R2B), by full name – thus packed her bags for a house in the middle of nowhere, well… in the Cévennes, a harsh landscape that polishes artists’ souls the way the wind polishes stones. It is there that Almost Punk took shape while its author stood upright. “A place also creates a sonic identity, she says. Strangely, nature didn’t lead me toward the guitar, but toward something very electronic.” In this rugged solitude, her voice opened up, her breath spread out: screams, choirs, guiding voices, a new, “organic” physicality that one finds in every sound. Nature made her more resilient, more punk, but also more tender. Once freed from social noise and its incessant stimuli, she could mobilize her attention differently. “The thread of the album was to come out of myself, to go outward”, she analyzes.
A Defiant Tension
At 35, the singer talks about our society as a nasty scar. She looks at it, listens to her friends, office workers, managers in constant survival, occupants of glass-walled open spaces, a machine to standardize that manufactures burnouts on a conveyor belt, as the suffocating “salary mask” peels away. “You know something is wrong when people start blowing a fuse in soundproof glass cabins: everyone sees them, no one hears them. An incredible metaphor,” she notes. “Bullshit job” brands the managerial Newspeak, the instruction to smile under neon, and it shoves our noses into our collective dissociation, as we frantically type on keyboards to mask our emotional collapse. The writing dives into documentary satire, images firing off, a legacy of her training at La Fémis, a leading film school.
The songs of P.R2B have always resembled short films: a setting, a tracking shot, a dramaturgy. With her, rage never advances without romance, making Almost Punk swing between nerve and caress. A defiant tension: “There are tracks where I say things frankly, where I’m fed up, where I denounce… and others that carry hope, softness, the possibility of tenderness. It’s important for me to keep both.” When Gamma Rays, born of the suffocating city, showed suspended daydreams and inner visions, the Cévennes brought her back to reality, to movement. “Facing the mountains, I often felt like I was in a Miyazaki film, but my body had to be in motion to live. When you’re sad, you cry, then you remember you must buy wood pellets to avoid freezing”, she says. And to sum up: “In the first album, I was a witness; in this one, I was an actress.” Her influences are still there, including Jacques Demy, with his sung separations and Technicolor melancholy. But something hardened by rubbing against reality. In this sonic cinema, you also hear her spiritual mothers: the poetic brilliance of Brigitte Fontaine, the organic textures of Björk, Patti Smith’s sacred anger, PJ Harvey’s earthy roughness… Almost Punk is a crossroads where these legacies come together.
Almost Punk, perhaps, but always 100% dyke. “My lesbianism infuses the entire album, not only as a personal identity, but as a question to the world”, she suggests. Including toward nature, “more lesbian than you think”, and toward the city, a promised land for the margins, even as she reproduces the strictest norms. “We’ve long segregated homosexuals in the city, we’ve been made to believe that nature wasn’t for us, she complains. But in Paris, we’re surrounded by aggressive sexual representations, ads everywhere…” Nature rests because it demands nothing, it welcomes without fuss and lets you be. Like many lesbians before her, P.R2B makes you want to believe in the possibility of a thriving queer rurality. She recounts the concert at the village’s association café, the apprehension of singing her lesbian titles there and the room staying: “49 people, only one left”. Joy brings people together.
