The band was allowed privileged access to the museum - Mazzalai flashes a badge bearing his name, because even world famous musicians cannot just stroll freely within robbing distance of the Mona Lisa after hours. “And when you play music, the beauty of it is that you instantly forget everything.”Īlpha Zulu was made in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a wing of the Louvre that houses thousands of decorative artifacts like clothing and furniture dating back to the Middle Ages, inside of which a private space was converted to a recording studio. “This place of fear, and the fact that we were separated from Thomas - we didn’t need a theme because we were just trying to survive artistically,” Brancowitz says, with a weary laugh. Mars compares it to their 2000 debut United, which was “full of ideas that were really spread out and shouldn't belong together,” because the band was so pent up under the circumstances of lockdown and the global pandemic that the music just had to come out, once they had a chance to be in the same place. (Get yourself a cone, put on the record, and go for a walk in the sun - it’ll snap into place.) Alpha Zulu, by contrast, was all over the place. Their last record, Ti Amo, was inspired by a fantasy of Italy once that was in place, much of the work went toward sculpting their recorded music into something that sounded like gelato. Phoenix are used to recording hours and hours of music for each record, raw material they polish and shape into a set of songs. A million bands tried to sound like Phoenix after Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and none of them succeeded, and 13 years later the originals are still here and making great records.

This is partly what makes their music seem miraculous - that these decades together have resulted in a deepening connection, and a continuous refining of the sensibility that brought them together as teenagers, which anyone can hear for themselves by hitting play.

Listening to Phoenix makes me think about those friendships: how far we’ve come and how we’ve diverged, how this is nothing unique but still sad in the way many normal things that everyone has to go through are sad. Like you, I’m not as close with my childhood friends as I used to be - life and all its vagaries have wedged a distance that only collapses at the occasional holiday hang. them” dynamic familiar to many teen bands, but it sustained them past young adulthood and into the adult world, where their laboring and insularity and utter Frenchness resulted in a sensual and propulsive sound born of consensus between four best friends who freely admit to being incapable of playing with other musicians.Įvery Phoenix record is an attempt to synthesize this bond and translate it for the listening public, an act of communion whose ongoing transference feels worthy of contemplation. (Thomas’ real surname is Croquet, and you’ll agree that it’s no competition for “Mars.”) This incubated an “us vs. They started playing together as teenagers, when they had scant musical ability but already a surfeit of taste and attitude - very quickly, they were picking stage names to sound cooler. The members of Phoenix - singer Thomas Mars, guitarists (and brothers) Laurent Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai, and bassist/keyboardist Deck D’arcy - met as boys growing up in genteel and stately Versailles, where they bonded over their love of artists like Pixies and the Sex Pistols, which made them outsiders in a city built around the idea of venerating the very distant past. (Yes, that Louvre, but more on that in a moment.) Just as impressive as those seven albums across 25 years and where they’ve chosen to make them is how Phoenix have done it as a harmonious four-man unit who’ve suffered no real discord, no fracturing crises. Now, they’re back with Alpha Zulu, their first album in five years, which was recorded at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, inside the Louvre.

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