POTOCHKINE - Sang d’Encre

There are records that don't just make you dance: they stare you in the eyes while you do it. "Sang d'Encre", the fourth album by Parisian duo Potochkine, belongs to this category. It's a work that pulses with anxiety, theatricality and desire, weaving that typically French poetic sensibility into a physicality that at times gives no quarter. This approach might only superficially recall the countless dark-synth projects that have popped up in recent years, since over time Pauline Alcaïdé and Hugo Sempé have managed to hone an ever more daring and cross-genre formula.

The opener "BI" is a statement of intent, a call to arms where a scorching martial beat (the bass digs straight into the muscles) is paired with a voice declaimed like an indictment whispered in an underground cell. When it's "Endorphines"'s turn (a bombshell already well tested in European clubs), the rhythmic whip comes down on the dancefloor, setting us alight with blows of dark techno-EBM. Next comes "Partir", less enveloping and unpredictable, though still moving with an inexorably neurotic gait.

However, the strength of "Sang d'Encre" doesn't lie only in the power of the beat: we also find it in Alcaïdé's voice, capable of oscillating with perverse elegance between coldness, softness and menace. It's interpretation, not mere singing, something that lends the tracks an almost theatrical, performative dimension. You can hear it in "Tristesse Fantasmée", an unsettling, narrative song that lightens the album's momentum with an almost enfantin touch that's nevertheless never truly innocent.

In the second half of the album, the synthetic distortions of "Bonnie" stand out, a spectral, paranoid passage, a small domestic ritual that sounds very much like an existential omen. Here a darkwave component prevails, bleak and obsessive in its contours, a plague that clings to the skin before exploding in the closing twist, namely the sixteen-plus minutes of "La Source". We're faced with a slow descent into the underworld set against a post-industrial backdrop. We walk through a tunnel after the club lights have gone out, listening to the sound of our footsteps dissolving against walls that have gone cold. Murmurs and electronic ghosts that emerge and vanish, almost in memory of Aghast thirty years on from their one and only masterpiece. An extreme but necessary ending. After the dancing, death - or at least a form of cathartic surrender.

Compared to the previous "Sortilèges" (2021), here Potochkine push toward a more refined and experimental sound: dark-clubbing, yes, but also a sonic psychodrama, emotional narrative and awareness of their own identity. "Sang D'Encre" thus remains distinctive, icy, finely calibrated but never sterile. And when the last note fades away, you realise that the ink of the title was no metaphor - it really was blood. A visceral, irréversible flow.

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28/11/2025