From Édith Piaf to Serge Gainsbourg, France is fiercely protective of the chanson tradition of character-driven French-language love songs. So it’s not often that someone is credited with reinventing the genre. Especially if that someone is a freeform-dancing, electro-influenced former care-worker hailing from the far-flung Atlantic coast.
In little more than a year, Zaho de Sagazan, a 24-year-old from the working-class shipyard town of Saint Nazaire, has gone from playing provincial music festivals to sweeping the board at les Victoires, the French Grammys. Her platinum album La Symphonie des Éclairs (“lightning symphony”) is seen as redefining 1950s and 1960s chanson française with its spiky lyrics about hypersensitivity, coercive control, cannabis, crushes and the climate crisis, all delivered in a deep, theatrically over-emphasised diction to rival Charles Aznavour. The emotion is compounded by the cold, thumping machine beats of French electronica she weaves into her songs.
