Two years after the release of his first album, goreBelgian-Congolese singer-songwriter Lous and the Yakuza returns with IOTA, striking from the first listen: there is light in her songs, hope in her voice, even when she speaks of love in the past tense. “Myself, I would never have thought one day of making music that makes you want to dance! recognizes the musician, joined in Paris by videoconference.
The third song on the album is titled Takata, onomatopoeia describing the reggaeton cadence on which Lous (Marie-Pierra Kakoma) lays his voice. The composer and producer friend El Guincho, accomplice of the Spanish pop star Rosalía, is once again putting his hand to the dough for this feverish album where the trap grooves of the first disc soften to give more flexibility to the R&B song of the young musician — the album opens with Sky“kind of open letter, or prayer, addressing my spirituality, everything that soothes and calms me down”.
“It’s nice for me to leave certain heavy subjects, even if they are still there because embedded in society,” says Lous. On my first album, I talked about prostitution, racism, rape. Horrible realities that she knew intimately. “These issues haven’t gone away, but darkness isn’t humanity’s only subject, that’s the good news. In this project, I indeed wanted to talk about love, about experiences that I have had, in terms of relationships. »
On IOTAlisteners will find a famous sequence, in the final stretch of the album: Kisebouncy trap rhythm, Monsterssuperb electro-pop softness, then the astonishing fadan acoustic ballad recorded with Damso, which reveals another facet of the popular Belgian rapper.
“We were on the phone, says Lous, we were talking about everything and nothing, and, inadvertently, I hung up a key on the keyboard, and the instrumental of the song began to play. Damso was curious, so I explained to him that it was a song about love — “I want to tell you I love you and go away from here” — not exactly the kind of theme that would have interested him… He asked me to send him the piece, and 16 minutes later, he sent me back his verse! Damso, I think it’s an old soul in a young body. »
” On KiseI am tormented, and on MonstersI am soothed, explains Lous. Kise, it’s a crazy, almost toxic love story, where you tell yourself that we’ll go all the way — we’ll both end up in the police station. If one of us commits a crime, we’ll both go to jail. And Monsters, is the opposite metaphor; I sing “When I enter they follow me calmly”, speaking of my monsters who have the keys to my apartment”, as if to tell us that the musician has managed to tame what haunted the lyrics of her first album.
The dream of a lifetime
She composed her 12 new songs in May 2021 in Miami, with El Guincho and Mems, also from the adventure of the first album. “It was the pandemic that forced me to make this album in the United States and Mexico”, the round trips between Europe and America made complicated by the circulation of the coronavirus. “But it’s true that Miami is an extremely lively city, and the United States a very interesting country,” she says, smiling. Between Miami and Los Angeles, there is the same cultural gap as between Spain and Greece! »
IOTA appeared last Friday, preceded by a remarkable hype (Lous was on the front page of the Vogue France last October, no less), and at the end of two fertile years for the musician – in recent months, she has toured the stages of France and Belgium, provided the first part of Gorillaz and given her first concerts in New York.
“There is always a part of astonishment. I ask myself: “What the hell am I doing here?” Even there, right now, I’m like, ‘I’m talking to Canadian media, this is crazy. Basically, I come from Rwanda and Congo. I dreamed about it like crazy, all my life, and even there are dreams that I did not allow myself to have so much they seemed unattainable to me, especially at the start of my career. I thought I had to wait 15 years before arriving on the international scene. Eventually, it took me a song,” Dilemmaand its powerful music video, viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube since its release three years ago.