The Pop Corporation

When music lacks the usual verse-chorus-verse, it’s difficult to explain why you like it. Like a good techno album, you’re found waving your hands around and saying “I dunno – it just works and it’s all great!”, as you try and pinpoint various sections that made your brain fizz.

Likewise, when faced with ambient music, you’re wading through the worry of talking solely about the feeling you get, and using words like ‘vibe’. Yuck. However, it’s worth trying because there’s artists out there who are making music worth listening to in this field, and in Malibu – French producer Barbara Braccini – we’re not looking at someone simply aping New Age records and Brian Eno LPs.

With ‘Vanities’, there is not only that gorgeous, weightlessness of ambient music, but also a tension and melancholy to make the whole thing more cinematic and longing.

In 2025, the sense of alienation that hangs around young people isolated online, dreaming of community and a timeline that isn’t fraught with constant point-scoring and in-fighting, Malibu is making music that is channelling all of these things with brooding washes of synthesiser, and fragments of words that seep through the romance of abandoned landscapes.

“It’s our secret, you can’t tell anybody,” emerge while your surrounded by music that’s part hymnal, part barren environment. It’s all incredibly evocative and noirish – it isn’t something you’re going to find the latte mums and dads whipping out for their yoga sessions, that’s for certain.

That’s not to say this is all impenetrably bereft of joy – there’s a gentle hopefulness hidden away in the music, sprouting out like foliage through concrete that keeps you tuned in while you zone out.

This tends to reveal itself with the use of acoustic instrumentation through the industrial sized electronic washes – flourishes of piano and Braccini’s own voice create the warmth and lightness of the heaviness you find elsewhere.

What’s so refreshing about the album is that it doesn’t suffer from the over-indulgence you find in a lot of records like this. 13 tracks, with many of the tracks concise, which makes for an album that feels more local than infinite and sprawling – they feel more like songs than ‘pieces’.

Instead of being something that feels like a gallery piece, we instead are left with something much more intimate than that. The feint environmental elements of a nearby city, or the weather, pulls the focus much closer to home than some intergalactic, cosmic slop.

Sure, it’s ethereal and angelic, but it’s also very much of our surroundings and the places we walk. When the heaviness comes, Malibu remembers to lift the weight, and that’s what makes this album worth repeated listens.

References to hauntology are made too often about anything with a sense of unease at the moment, but this has that same shared eeriness that we enjoy in the works of Boards of Canada, replacing public access TV static with half-lit cityscapes.

You won’t want to listen to this a track-at-a-time – this is something to indulge in in its entirety.