Mylène Farmer’s Égrégore arrives with DJ Snake and Moby, and no tour to follow

Égrégore, the 13th studio album by Mylène Farmer, hands its sound to three very different producers: DJ Snake, Moby and DJ Lewis, a 28-year-old who co-writes the music on eight of the 13 tracks. Farmer wrote every lyric herself. The title, an esoteric term for the collective spirit a group generates around a shared desire, reads like a note to the audience that has followed her for four decades.

For French pop, this is a veteran star moving toward the club producers who rule the charts, not away from them. DJ Snake, the French producer behind global hits such as Lean On and Turn Down for What, appears on two tracks, the uptempo Combien pour la nuit and the softer Sans amarres. Moby, who first recorded with Farmer two decades ago on Slipping Away (Crier la vie), returns with two more, Recréer un jour and the closing Plus d’écho.

It is her first studio album since L’Emprise, four years ago, and the rollout leaned hard on cinema. Julia Ducournau, the Palme d’Or-winning director of Titane, shot the video for C’est à qui le tour. Gilles Lellouche directed the one for Combien pour la nuit, and Des lols et des quoi was filmed inside the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Confession, already heard as a tribute to David Lynch, sits near the end of the tracklist, and Dieu est mort will also appear on the soundtrack of the film Scrooge, according to the Belgian daily La DH.

The record is dense with callbacks to her own past. La DH’s critic, who heard it at a cinema preview, noted that the C’est à qui le tour video brings back the personas of Libertine, Sans contrefaçon and Pourvu qu’elle soit douce, and that Plus d’écho plays over footage spanning her whole live career up to the Nevermore tour. The same review openly asked whether this could be her final album.

That reading is speculation, and Farmer has spent a career encouraging exactly this kind of guessing. The harder limits are practical. No tour was announced at the preview, which disappointed some fans in the room, and nothing in the rollout aims beyond the people who already own the old records: the cinema screenings, the Fnac collectibles, the self-quotation. A DJ Snake credit can open a playlist door, but the album is entirely in French, and that has always capped her reach outside French-speaking markets.

Égrégore was released on October 30 by Stuffed Monkey, Farmer’s own label, distributed by Sony Music France, on CD, vinyl and streaming, with 13 tracks running about 45 minutes. A pop-up store dedicated to the album runs at Fnac Montparnasse in Paris until November 15, and the Scrooge release on November 11 will carry Dieu est mort into cinemas.

An égrégore exists only while the crowd keeps believing in it. Whether Farmer brings that crowd back to a stage is the one thing the album leaves unannounced.

Tags: French pop, Mylène Farmer, chanson française, DJ Snake, Égrégore, Moby