Stromae has always been drawn to the idea of embodying characters in his songs. On “Formidable,” a single from his 2013 sophomore album Racine carreé (French for Square Root), the Belgian singer-rapper-producer depicts a man who gets shitfaced in the throes of a breakup. For the video, he played the character, stumbling around in front of confused commuters and police officers at the Louise train station in Brussels. But his writing is too empathic to be passed off as mere camp. Yes, this man is swaying through the street and harassing different people — a single woman, a married man, a child — about their understandings of love, but his projections come from a place of real hurt. The song’s hook plays on the phonetic similarities between the French words “formidable” (wonderful) and “fort minable” (pathetic), with the latter also leaning on his character’s implied inability to have children. It’s a bittersweet moment made all the more potent by the deep bass drums and string swells begging listeners to dance.
“Formidable” and songs like “Tous les Mêmes” — which is told from the perspective of a woman tired of the dating scene — illuminate Stromae’s gifts as a character-oriented storyteller, but are ultimately isolated moments on Racine carreé. Much of the emphasis in Stromae’s earlier music revolved around his fascination with folding hip-hop tropes and weighty subject matter (the AIDS epidemic on “Moules frites,” his own personal struggle with fatherlessness on “Papaoutai”) into colorful nuggets of dance and electropop. But on his latest album Multitude — his first in nearly a decade — he expands his worldbuilding skill on both a musical and literary scale.
