The Pop Corporation

It may have been released in February, but the chances of English readers being all. Over Biche’s magnificent album are slim, and an album doesn’t need to be fresh off the grill to get excited about.

Fact is, it’s so hard to make original music in 2025, that when a band arrives that sound like all the best bits of your record collection, but not sound like facsimiles of any other group, it’s worth shouting about. There’s regrettably few reviews of this album that we can see, so we’re addressing the balance, better late than never.

We’ve been sat with the ‘B.I.C.H.E.’ LP for a few weeks, on constant repeat after accidentally stumbling into it, and have been rewarded with a long player that is in turn, beautiful and elegant as well as being straight out psychedelic pop. It manages to be a complex, avant garde electronic rock album, while retaining hooks and ear-worms, switching between cool detachment and infectious charm.

The devil here, is in the details, with carefully chosen, spiralling analogue synths, soft and groovy bass lines, and vocals that bob-and-weave with something that feels like tape splicing, and in other instances, easy cool.

If we’re forced to liken them to some other groups, then we’re pulling out copies of the eponymous album from The United States of America, ‘Neon Golden’ by the Notwist, Stereolab in their ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup’ period, with traces of Italian library records, cosmic German music, ’60s mellotron psychedelia and the dreamier end of The Beach Boys when they got super weird.

They refer to themselves as “weird but playful pop from les Yvelines”, which is a much more succinct way of saying things.

There’s so much to enjoy while listening to this album as a whole and throughout it, you’re pulled and pushed through a variety of styles – modern, experimental pop on album highlight ‘Le Code’, and the En Attendent Ana featuring ‘Americanism’, to the luxury of tracks like ‘Le Mont Ventoux’ and ‘Une Brève Interrogation’.

The light and shade of the album is truly wonderful and, sometimes you’ll hear these disparate things emerge within the same song. You’ll hear baroque pop strings melting into wobbly synths and cyclical rhythms, while cool, detached vocals glide over the top, which soon ease into deceptively rich harmonies, and the whole thing makes for an entirely mesmerising album.

‘L’Engrenage’ meanwhile, manages to sound like something from Revolver AND Tortoise at the same time. It’s a wonderful, jazzy gem of psychedelic pop.

When French rock music is good, it’s unbeatable, and Biche have made an album deserving of a lot of love and time, and a contains all the things that is so irresistible about French psychedelic music, as well as having all the charm of psych from other countries too.

This is an album that has been gently floating under the radar and honestly, that is something that needs to change because it is such a rewarding listen every time you fire it up. It will only get better on further listens and you need to get it into your life the first chance you get.

This is a perfect record.

Biche ‘B.I.C.H.E.’ is available to stream and to buy directly from the group themselves at bichemusic.bandcamp.com