The Louche, Romantic, Feral World of Sébastien Tellier

In January, French musician Sébastien Tellier released his seventh album, “Kiss the Beast.” On the cover, in a frontal portrait by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Tellier is overflowing with guru-like long hair that his white button-down can’t contain. “I’m the ‘Kiss’ and the ‘Beast,’” Tellier explains over Zoom, wearing a rhinestone-studded baseball cap. (He clarifies, for those who are literally-minded: “It’s not a beast in the wood. It’s the beast inside you.”) It’s a call to “accept your savage side.”

Embracing his id is not something he always felt he could do. “I was a sad teenager,” he reflects, as a banlieusard who grew up in Cergy-Pontoise, the homogeneously built northwestern outskirts of Paris (“no charm, not classy at all”). But he’s had quite a run since he began making his own music on a four-track recorder. His first outing as a professional musician was a quarter century ago, when he was the first act signed onto Air’s new label Record Makers, via his 2001 album “L’Incroyable Vérité.” He thereafter followed Air on tour.

His breakout song, the spirited but melancholic and affecting “La Ritournelle” (which had many lives in soundtracks and advertisements), hinges on piano, bass, drums and strings; he considers it timeless. “It’s not a question of production,” he adds. “The sensation hasn’t become old.” He played it live, singing before a piano and accompanied by a string orchestra, at the Opening Ceremony of Paris’s 2024 Paralympics.

Tellier has released albums every few years: “Politics” (2004), “Sexuality” (2008), “My God Is Blue” (2012), “L’Aventura” (2014) and “Domesticated” (2020). Looking back on his discography, he says, “each album is a representation of how [I’ve grown] up: my new state of mind, my new vision on the world.” In a true charting of adulting, his previous album reflects what it means to become a family man and the banality of cleaning up after chaotic children. “I don’t care that I’m not young anymore. I never bet on my youngness, and so I feel okay to be 50.”

His process begins with composition and lyrics; in the studio, he does all his demos alone. He fiddles until he hears something “that excites my ear,” often simply three or four notes. “It’s a mix between luck and chaos,” he admits. “It’s chord by chord… sometimes I can compose a song in 10 minutes, and sometimes it could be two weeks.”

Once he has his melody, he tries singing in English, French, Spanish and sometimes Italian, looking for the language that will help his melody rise. He finds that energetic songs are better suited for English, whereas French is better suited for intimiste music and romantic feelings. (“I do my sad song in French and my happy song in English.”)

Equal parts pop artist and crooner, Tellier is very prone to nostalgia. “My heart is still stuck in the 80s,” he admits. His very favorite synthesizer, the Prophet-5, dates from 1977. “I want to keep the best side of the past but… I try to discover something new,” he says, and that newness stems from trying “to find something with no name. It’s a feeling; it’s a question of style.”

In his latest work, the level of autotune is high (“I’m not like Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé,” he once said). He wanted Thrill of the Night to be a hit; to get a mainstream guarantee, he wondered “who is the big hit maker now? The guy who worked with The Weeknd is a good one! I said to myself, ‘Okay, I have to call this guy.’” That guy was Oscar Holter, the mind behind The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” Tellier’s breathy, synth-y track features Slayyyter and Nile Rodgers.

He still loves French electronic music (like Daft Punk and Justice), and French hip hop and rap (like PNL and Booba). “But I think in the new world, we don’t really care about where the music comes from,” he says. “Now it’s not a question of country, it’s a question of feelings and sensations. The country doesn’t matter anymore because French can sing in English, a Spanish singer can sing in English… it’s just an international game.” Said by a former participant in Eurovision! (He sang “Divine,” a track from an album co-produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, after arriving onstage in a golf cart, sporting a glittering blazer and inhaling from a helium balloon. He placed 19th.)

In conversation, Tellier is refreshingly low-key. He talks about how much he loves flowers—which fill his house—and self-describes as “sensitive.” The gentleness, or douceur, of his approach can be found in his music, but is cloaked in a kind of aestheticized seedy masculinity. In most articles about the French musician, the adjective “louche” is inevitably dropped, as is a reference to musician/infamous dirtbag Serge Gainsbourg, vis-à-vis predecessor vibes. French pop culture magazine Les Inrocks dubbed Tellier “le chanteur à la barbe légendaire.” In a slip of the tongue, Tellier called his own album “Kiss the Bitch.”

Tellier clearly plays with his image. As a fan of Salvador Dalí, he fittingly loves exaggerating his persona—sometimes, in ways that can seem dubious. His 2012 video for “Cochon Ville is filled with naked bodies and violence against women, but is framed as being cult cosplay. The cover for “Sexuality” features a tiny man riding a donkey about to traverse a larger-than-life naked woman’s torso, like something Terry Gilliam might have dreamed up. Pitchfork once described Tellier as emitting “a particularly retro kind of theatrical sleaziness distilled from early-VHS-era pornography.”

Tellier toys with this. In fact, his look was put on display in January in Paris, where he was featured at Perrotin as a muse. (Something is in the air with musicians in galleries. Elsewhere in the Marais, his collaborator on the track “Amnesia,” Kid Cudi, né Scotty Ramon, recently showed paintings at Ruttkowski;68.) The Perrotin show was a kind of flashy marketing extravaganza in the lead-up to “Kiss the Beast,” a mix of oversized guitars and stylized photo shoots, created in collaboration with French artist Xavier Veilhan, Tellier’s longtime friend.

Tellier’s relationship to the art world is very tied to Veilhan, with whom he first collaborated 20 years ago. “I went to his atelier with my keyboard, and I composed the music of the movie in front of him,” he recalls. They worked together on the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which was imagined as a recording studio-sculpture; Tellier was one of the performers invited to do a one-off performance for the public. Down the line, Veilhan became the godfather of his son, and Tellier owns several artworks by his friend. Tellier also collects work by Hungarian-French Op artist Victor Vasarely. “I’m a small collector,” he demurs. “I miss [the] big money.”

In today’s world, it seems like embracing one’s savage side, or “kissing the beast,” is an attitude already widely unleashed and often to alarming effect. At least Tellier’s take is a reassuringly entertaining one.

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