A few months ago, Paul Van Haver, better known as the Belgian singer-songwriter/rapper Stromae, announced his comeback. In the French-speaking world, this was big news. As the 00s turned into the 2010s, Stromae had established himself as one of the biggest Francophone artists in the world. He sold 8.5m albums. His single Alors On Danse went to No 1 in 19 countries: in 2010, it was the most-played French-language song in the world. Its level of success was almost freakish, leading to the assumption that he was, as he puts it, “a one-hit wonder … when you have a hit people say it’s going to be the only hit in your life”.
But he wasn’t. His second album, 2013’s Racine Carrée, spent five years in the French chart: it was the best-selling album of the year twice on the trot. He was critically acclaimed for a kaleidoscopic sound that takes in everything from Congolese soukous to knowingly cheesy Europop to the mordant chanson of his countryman Jacques Brel, an unpredictable mishmash that he thinks is rooted in his peripatetic childhood. His largely absent father was Rwandan – he was killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide – and his Belgian mother was an inveterate traveller. “Sometimes we loved it and sometimes it was pretty close to a nightmare, because we didn’t have a lot of money, so they weren’t all-inclusive vacations,” he says. “Sometimes good memories, sometimes really bad, but memories you don’t forget.”
He became so famous that he launched his own fashion label in conjunction with his wife, a stylist. English-speaking artists seemed to be queueing up to work with him: Kanye West jumped on a remix, Lorde invited him to appear on the soundtrack for The Hunger Games, on which he collaborated with Pusha T, Haim and Q-Tip.
And then, in 2015, Stromae suddenly stopped. He pulled an African tour after suffering what he calls “a black hole” on stage. Speaking on Zoom from his French record company’s offices, it’s not something he wants to discuss in depth (“it’s really personal, so I prefer to keep that for me”), but it sounds like a panic attack. “It was kind of a burnout, and also because of a medicine called Lariam” – an anti-malaria medication that lists among its panoply of potential side-effects severe anxiety, paranoia, confusion, hallucinations, dizziness, shortness of breath and blurred vision – “but it was a really bad story.”
As a result, he avoided public appearances for the best part of three years, questioned whether he would ever make music in the future and kept a low profile. He released a solitary track in 2018 to tie in with his latest fashion collection and briefly turned up on Coldplay’s 2019 album Arabesque, but that was pretty much it. “It was important for me just to heal and get better,” he says.
Under the circumstances, you can see why Stromae’s first album in nine years, Multitude, is considered a very big deal. But it wasn’t just that he had decided to return. It was the way he chose to do it. In January, he turned up on a Sunday-night news broadcast on the French station TF1, ostensibly giving a straightforward interview, then, in answer to a question about mental health, suddenly started performing his new single L’Enfer.
He insists that the first part of the interview was real enough – “I didn’t know any of the questions, except the question [that was the cue] before I was to start singing” – but the whole thing was, in fact, a setup. Cue much controversy and debate. How dare someone turn a news broadcast into an advert for their new single, ran one argument in the French press. Isn’t every interview on a current affairs show with an artist who has something to promote just a glorified advert, another countered.
Stromae had considered the potential for a backlash. “I’m not a political figure, it’s just about music, but you’re right: it’s an ad,” he says. “So I think it’s pretty honest and modern from TF1, because TF1’s news on Sunday, it’s kind of a dinosaur, you know? But when an actor [is interviewed] on the news, it’s the same. He’s not revealing himself, he’s just acting, he’s just telling a story, so it’s between an act and a kind of a fiction.”
Whatever viewers and commentators thought about it, it was a very Stromae thing to do. Aside from his music, one of the things Stromae is famous for is blurring the lines between fact and fiction. There was the controversial video for his single Formidable, which consisted of hidden camera footage of him stumbling around the streets of Brussels, apparently drunk, complete with bystanders filming him on their phones, passersby attempting to help and the police intervening.
The idea, he explains, came from a video shot by an intrusive fan that went viral and made the national news. Stromae was eating in his car when a guy wielding a cameraphone knocked on his window and asked him: “‘Why are you in this shitty car, you have so much money?’” he recalls. “I was like, this viral video has more success than the video I just released? OK, so they want blood, I will give them blood.”
And there was the video grandly titled Stromae Takes America, featuring him busking around New York and being roundly ignored by passersby. There was a grain of truth at its centre. For all the high-profile co-signs, the English-speaking world has yet to take to his work with the kind of enthusiasm shown elsewhere, beyond a brief flash of success for Alors On Danse and some love on the hipster blogs. While Spanish-language artists such as Bad Bunny are now among the most successful in the world, Francophone acts haven’t had the same kind of crossover.
While you can appreciate the music on a song such as Multitude, which reaches back to Stromae’s childhood visits to Bolivia with his mother and features Chinese strings, it’s hard for non-French-speakers to grasp the blackly comic view of fatherhood on C’est Que du Bonheur without the aid of translation, meaning you miss out on his ironic juxtaposition of standard parenting platitudes with observations from its more visceral side. His son was born in 2018, a period that left its mark on the record.
“Yeah, I talk a lot about poop and pooping in general on this album,” Stromae says, laughing. “I actually had my hand in the shit for two years. There are so many songs that say ‘I love you, you’re the best thing in my life’, and that’s the reason I wanted to give another point of view.”
Still, he says, maybe there’s a positive to some audiences not understanding his lyrics. “There’s a lot of songs, even in French, that I couldn’t understand when I was young. I understood them when I was 20, and I was like, ‘Whoa, nice, another vision, another point of view of a song I’ve loved since I was seven.’ I think it’s the same with other languages – if you take the time to translate it, you go, ‘OK, I didn’t know it was about this.’ You don’t have to understand it if you feel it. It’s first a question of emotion, I think, and then, if you start to dig in, you discover meaning.”
• Multitude is released on Island/Universal on 4 March
