The first song on the first Christine & The Queens album, iT, featured the chorus: “I’ve got it, I’m a man now.” Eight years later, the man has caught up with the music. Christine, whose birth name was Héloïse, was playing with a masculine identity as a woman calling herself Chris on a second album in 2018. Now, though the band name has stayed the same, the person out front is called Redcar and the pronouns are he/him.
In a video made to accompany the new song La Chanson Du Chevalier he’s a muscle-flexing drunken sailor, limping around the set due to a knee injury that caused the postponement of concerts and this album from September. The music is gloomy and spectral, while the image, filmed with a lens that distorts his face in close-up, seems intent on confusing and confronting.
