Stromae: Racine Carrée

Monday marked the release of singer/rapper/producer Stromae's sophomore album Racine Carrée. In case you're not familiar, Stromae became a European dance mega star a few years back when he had an absolutely massive hit with his song Alors on Danse (note the 34+ million YouTube views). It reached number one in a handful of countries and was even given the 'remix' treatment by Mr Kardashian himself. Since then he spent some time off the radar until the next installment of his genius lesson series surfaced on YouTube (which we highly recommend you check out). Sadly though, the only actual new song released in that time period was 'Papaoutai', leaving us to pine for 320 kbps while we listened to low quality YouTube rips of tracks like 'Formidable' and 'Tous le Memes'.

But the wait is no more! Racine Carrée is here in all of its glory, showing the young Belgian making what is easily the best music of his career. Racine Carrée is a universal dance record, combining everything from progressive house, hip hop, and bass stylings to African and French melodic and rhythmic patterns. Each song feels like a single and oozes that indescribable 'x' factor that anything from the mouth of Stromae so appealing. It doesn't matter whether you speak the language or not, he is an artist who's charisma and vision comes thorough clearly in his music and makes it wholly affecting.

Really though, I've been waiting for this record so that I could have another excuse to post the wonderful video for 'Tous Le Memes' which debuted as Lecon no. 24 in February. So with that, here you go:

Get Racine Carrée on iTunes