Had COVID-19 not inserted its grubby protein spikes into virtually every aspect of modern life, last year would have marked the 10th consecutive edition of Pitchfork Music Festival Paris. That anniversary may have been thwarted, but fortunately, the combination of lockdown measures and widespread vaccinations enabled the return of the festival to the City of Lights this November, hot on the heels of the first-ever Pitchfork Music Festival London. Across seven nights, 48 artists brought their music to more than 7500 attendees at 10 different venues scattered across the city, mostly clustered in the Marais and Bastille districts—everything from grotty indie dives to the recently refurbished 19th century theater La Gaîté Lyrique. The week saw heavyweight jazz, whimsical indie rock, and a vast spectrum of singer-songwriter projects blending funk, jazz, and R&B with rock and electronic textures. The after parties, meanwhile, kept house music thumping well into the wee hours.
Here are eight highlights from the festival:
Amaarae – La Gaîté Lyrique, Wednesday, November 17
With Amaarae’s “Sad Girlz Luv Money Remix” featuring Kali Uchis and Moliy having just entered the Billboard Hot 100, the Ghanaian-American singer’s appearance at La Gaîté Lyrique felt like a victory lap from the moment she took the stage. Clad in a red dress, red headscarf, and dark glasses that never left her face, she came prepared for drama; her bandmates—bassist Daisy George, guitarist Raquel Martins, and crack drummer David Bitan—prefaced her walk-on with hard funk vamping that recalled James Brown’s hype-inducing intros. As they eased into songs from her 2020 album The Angel You Don’t Know, their playing tended to emphasize her music’s Afropop and Caribbean elements with carefully syncopated grooves and lilting, clean-toned guitar lines. Amaarae has a high, slightly wispy voice, and in songs like “Fancy,” she could be demure, almost coquettish, but her attitude was equal parts playful, defiant, and proud—particularly introducing “Leave Me Alone.” (“If they ain’t got no money for you,” she advised the crowd, “say, ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’ If they don’t have good sex for you, say, ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’ If they don’t have positive vibes, say, ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’ If all they have for you is negativity and lies, say, ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’”) That song, like most of the night’s, turned into a vigorous call-and-response between Amaarae and the amped-up, freshly empowered crowd. She closed the set the only way possible: with “Sad Girlz Luv Money,” which had the entire room singing along: “Get the fuck outta my way/I’m gonna get paid, yeah/I wanna get paid, yeah/Just gimme my mu-la-la-la.” For 45 minutes or so, Amaarae was the life coach everybody needed.
Nubya Garcia — Bataclan, Thursday, November 18
After nearly 16 months of lockdown-mandated closure, French nightclubs finally reopened in July. Yet even four months later, many of the week’s concerts were charged with a celebratory air—particularly on the part of artists still buzzing off the thrill of playing live again. That energy coursed through a set from Nubya Garcia, in which the London saxophonist and her bandmates—drummer Sam Jones, double bassist Daniel Casmir, and keyboardist Al MacSween—shifted effortlessly between airy reggae backbeats and the liquid modal jazz of Garcia’s stunning 2020 album Source. Early in what was scheduled as a 45-minute set at the Bataclan, she apologized for not having more time to speak to the crowd; the clock was ticking, and she wanted to play as much music as possible. “Sometimes the vibe’s just too right, and you guys are too right,” she said, glowing under the spotlights. “I just want to play all night.”
But before she put the horn to her lips again, she had one piece of advice. “Feel free to be whatever you are tonight,” she urged. “Let loose, let go. It’s so important, man! You don’t need my permission.” Her group’s music truly did feel like freedom incarnate, a rare mixture of force and grace, with Garcia’s lyrical playing effortlessly leading the way. Going into overtime, they closed with another dub-inspired tune, and as it swelled, it felt like the crowd was positively levitating. One man near the stage was headbanging in slow motion, dreads flying—making good on Garcia’s invitation to be free.
Sons of Kemet — Bataclan, Thursday, November 18
Moving with the agility of a hummingbird and the force of an earthmover, Sons of Kemet make music that feels like it shouldn’t, by the simple laws of physics, be possible at all. With two drummers, Edward Hick and Tom Skinner, providing the furious and resolute rhythmic backbone, the London quartet is fronted by Shabaka Hutchings (of Shabaka and the Ancestors) on tenor sax; towering over the stage, he cuts an imposing figure, zig-zagging between short, staccato riffs and wild, extended cadenzas. But the band’s secret weapon is Theon Cross, who plays his tuba with bunker-busting intensity. Who knew that the instrument was capable of generating such earth-quaking low-end frequencies?
For over an hour, the group laid down what was, in effect, a single, unbroken song, seething and surging in waves. The pounding dual drums imbued the music with steely, hypnotic focus. They treated the rhythm like an endurance sport—athletic, disciplined, but also charged with a daredevil spirit; following the groove felt like surfing a mudslide. Sons of Kemet’s music may nominally be classified as jazz, but the crowd was a roiling sea of moving bodies; it felt more like a hardcore show than a jazz gig. Poet Joshua Idehen appeared early in his set to recite his poem “Field Negus” while the band raged, lending the music an explicitly political cast as he shouted ecstatically, “Burn it all/Just burn it all.”
The group somehow found the energy for an encore, which was impressive—and fortunate, because their performance of “My Queen Is Doreen Lawrence” made for the most moving stretch of the night. Idehen returned to incant the song’s charged refrain: “Don’t wanna hear that racist claptrap/Anybody chat that crap get clapped back/Don’t wanna take my country back, mate/I wanna take my country forward.” He led the crowd in a rousing call-and-response of those final two lines, and the band heaved like a train just barely grabbing the rails. Then, some imperceptible limit having been reached, the musicians hit the brakes, slowing the tempo and lowering the volume until nothing was audible except for the air through their horns and the faintest brush of drumsticks. For just a moment, before exploding into applause, the crowd was silent; it felt like the sea had parted. Then the cheers came rushing into that empty space, and it was all over. Back out on the street, a full moon glowed faintly through the cloud cover.
Cassandra Jenkins – Café de la Danse, Friday, November 19
There may have been six people on stage, but Cassandra Jenkins’ Friday-night set felt more like a secret shared between two old friends. Seasoned public speakers know that lowering your voice is a tried-and-true technique for making people lean in, and the New York singer-songwriter did something similar to make the 400-cap room feel a tenth its size. On a short set of songs culled from her contemplative 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins and her bandmates (guitarist Michael Flynn, bassist Jack Seaton, drummer Justin Allen, keyboardist Gerard Black, and saxophonist Charlotte Greve) plied a stripped-down sound with nods to Mazzy Star, the War on Drugs, and even Talk Talk. Greve was the understated star of the show; she had an unerring way of finding an empty space in the music, then seeding it with melody. The band’s restraint meant that even the most modest crescendo was deeply felt. “The poetry/It’s not lost on me/I’m left asking/How it found me,” Jenkins sang in the slowcore dirge “Ambiguous Norway,” and for all the specificity of the lyric—the song is a lament for her late collaborator David Berman—it could just as well have been a way of summing up the subtle magic palpable every time Jenkins and her bandmates chose to do less instead of more.
Wet Leg – Supersonic, Friday, November 19
Wet Leg’s discography is still just two songs deep, but that didn’t seem to faze any of the throngs of people who came out Friday night to see them at Supersonic, a small, brick-walled club with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the street. The line outside the venue stretched down the block, and on the floor in front of the low stage, there was barely enough elbow room to hoist a beer to your lips; upstairs in the balcony, the situation wasn’t much more navigable. Hailing from the Isle of Wight, the group—fronted by the duo of Hester Chambers and Rhian Teasdale, both on guitar, supported tonight by Ellis Durand, Henry Holmes, and Joshua Mobaraki—traffics in a pithy brand of indie rock that’s indebted to bands like the Breeders, Stereolab, and, especially, Elastica. You might call it retro if it wasn’t so timeless, distilling multiple generations of post-punk and indie pop into three-chord progressions expressed in two-minute bursts. Putting a fresh spin on a sound this familiar is no easy thing, but with their crunchy guitar tone and punchy melodies, Wet Leg have managed to carve out their own niche; having a knack for memorably deadpan lyrics doesn’t hurt. The entire crowd screamed along to the pre-chorus of “Wet Dream”: “You said, ‘Baby, do you want to come home with me?/I got Buffalo ’66 on DVD.’” (Then again, Vincent Gallo always did have a big following in France.) They sang along even more vigorously to the closing “Chaise Lounge,” the group’s biggest hit to date; no single moment in the seven-song set elicited greater elation than when Teasdale slipped an improvised French lyric into the song. “Excuse moi?” she asked, and the shout back—“What?!”—was practically deafening, an expression of joy that needed no translation.
Sofia Kourtesis – Badaboum, Friday, November 19
Berlin-based DJ/producer Sofia Kourtesis arrived in Paris from Peru just hours before her set was to begin; another few hours after leaving the decks, she was scheduled to be back on the plane to Lima, where she has been caring for an ill family member for the past three months—“essentially living in the ICU,” as she confided to me before her set. As lockdown measures around the world ease, many DJs have expressed mixed emotions about returning to club life’s whirlwind of transatlantic flights and high-decibel all-nighters; it’s all the more confusing for someone that’s dealing with a family crisis at the same time. (Sadly, Kourtesis has been in this boat before: She wrote this year’s Fresia Magdalena EP in the wake of her father’s death; its beatific frequencies are a way of grappling with the kind of unthinkable loss that all of us must come to terms with, sooner or later.) But Kourtesis’ playing seemed to thrive off whatever emotions she was experiencing. She built the foundation of her DJ set out of lush, springy cuts like her own “Lana Gaye” and “Sarita Colonia,” as well as Sound Stream’s “Bass Affairs” and Four Tet’s “Only Human.” By her penultimate song—Acid Pauli’s “Nana,” a vibe among vibes—the club had filled to capacity and couples were making out on the dancefloor; Kourtesis stood on the decks, practically hanging from the ceiling pipes, to introduce her closing song, her own “La Perla.” For a few hours, at least, floating between bass bins felt normal again, however fleetingly.
ML Buch – Popup!, Saturday, November 20
Danish musician ML Buch once swallowed a pill with a microscopic camera in it, then broadcast the inside of her intestines as the visual accompaniment to a live performance. It was “pretty intimate,” she has admitted. But her opening set at the tiny Popup! club was intimate for more traditional reasons. The crowd was small yet filled the room; a few people in front of the stage sat on the floor, lending to the house-show vibe. Buch’s last album, Skinned, takes the entire internet—things as specific as screens and avatars, and ideas as broad as desire and distance—as fodder for a surprising brand of singer-songwriter music, one that fuses ’90s indie melodies to the electronics of the contemporary Danish avant-garde. Live, she navigated that divide with ease. On some songs, backing tracks of synth or guitar accompanied her as she sang and played lead on a Fender Stratocaster; other times, she stripped down to just voice and synth or voice and guitar, freed from the constraints of MIDI or click tracks. This method of shifting between the programmed and the played felt true to her music, given its preoccupations with presence and virtuality. She closed with “Teen,” from 2017’s Fleshy. Over cottony synths and the faintest hint of a hi-hat, she sang sweetly, “The kid you once were/Is a stranger now/The teen you once were/Is a stranger now.” It was melancholy but also hopeful, freeing—the kind of wisdom that feels like a gift. For all its simplicity, it was as generous a set as you could have asked for.
L’Rain – Badaboum, Saturday, November 20
At times, L’Rain’s set at Badaboum felt a little bit like being underwater. Soft light bathed the stage; flowers festooned the New York musician’s mic stands; and she and her bandmates (drummer Alwyn Robinson, bassist/guitarist Justin Felton, guitarist Zach Levine-Caleb, and keyboardist/saxophonist Ben Chapoteau-Katz) whipped up slow, psychedelic swirls of shifting tone. The effect was murkier than her exceptional 2021 album Fatigue, but perhaps even more physical. The emotion could be somber, if tempered with points of light. (“We just released a record called Fatigue and, yeah,” she said, introducing herself with a wry, DGAF chuckle: “I’m tired, are you all tired? I’m tired of a lot of shit. And that’s what the record’s about!”)
But nothing was stable; their performance represented a nonstop transmutation of forces. She introduced the final song by whistling birdlike sounds over wafting synth pads and quieting the murmurs at the back of the room (“An audience is a two-way transfer of energy, and especially for this one, I need you here, with me, for a few minutes; I promise you, it won’t kill you to keep your mouth shut and your eyes closed to be in the moment with me”). And then, over the next 12 minutes, the group built from liquid ambient tones, led by L’Rain’s wordless, mournful singing, into a surging maelstrom of conflicting currents: rapidfire drum rolls; clanging guitar feedback; electronic squalls. The climactic finale was as full-on as any noise band. The amps were still ringing as each musician filed off stage, leaving the room vibrating like a struck bell—until a stagehand finally climbed up to unceremoniously flick off the last droning amp. And even then, the spell remained unbroken.