Today, Voyou releases ‘Les trois loubards‘[listen] from his forthcoming album ‘Les Bruits De La Ville’, which in English means Noises of the City. The song, translating to mean Three Hooligans, displays Voyou’s penchant for engaging and fun indie pop music where the joy in it transcends any language barriers.
At the beginning of 2018, a peculiar young man came onto the scene. With the devil in his eye and a trumpet in his hand, Thibaud Vanhooland aka Voyouquickly got himself noticed with his sensationally jolly rhythms and an enthralling live show.
Born in Lille in the late 80’s, his mother raised him to the sounds of Latino music. His father, a music professor and lover of classical and jazz, introduced him to the trumpet at a very young age. In high school, he started his first band and decided to dedicate himself to his lifelong passion. Showing up in a number of groups and forging his experience both in the studio and on stage he lived his life like a daily avant-garde novel. But, as some of his fellow players moved on – or, for others, spiraled – the time came for him to go it alone, with his own songs.
Thus Thibaud became Voyou. A hoodlum. A lout. The word is dear to him, for it is the ideal means of keeping his private life separate from his work, allowing him to take on a myriad of personalities.
In a demonstration of carefree being, Voyou paints a well-intentioned view on his time, choosing to place compassion and friendship at the heart of his music. “Les Bruits de la Ville” [“noises of the city”] tells the story of a girl discovering a big city. “Even when I talk about myself, I lend my voice to characters” Voyou, who recently arrived in Paris from Nantes, confesses. He therefore proposed Yelle to play the lead role. With “an upturned heart and eyes that devour the cities delights” [“le cœur en l’air et les yeux qui dévorent toutes les saveurs de la ville”] Yelle perfectly embodies this character.
His music oscillates between naturalist chanson and jolly electro, at the crossroads between the pleasant nonchalance of Mac DeMarco and the benevolence of Alain Souchon. With impressive liberty and richness, his noises of the city echo the promise of a formidable form of pop. A promise Voyou has every intention of keeping.
