La Fine Equipe are a wildly talented group of beatmakers comprised of four skilled producers from Marseille. Oogo, Chomsky, Mr Gib & Blanka, have been making a thrilling mixture of hip-hop, disco, R&B and funk for a decade, releasing albums that act as immaculate snapshots of French electronic music at the time.
The group originally broke out with 2008’s ‘La Boulangerie’, a collection of tracks that brought their gift for creating funk fuelled blasts of hip-hop and dance into the mainstream. The group then went from strength-to-strength developing their sound with 2010 followup ‘Fantastic Planet’ and 2011s ‘La Boulangerie 2 (La Fine Equipe & Friends)’. 2014 saw the release of ‘La Boulangerie, Vol 3.’ a record that added doubled their propensity for skipping drums and buzzing electronics.
Now, La Fine Equipe are set to release their fifth record, the aptly titled ‘5th Season’. It feels like a definitive record for the group, a culmination of all the sounds and influences they have been inspired by throughout their career whilst embracing new trends in electronic music like trap and footwork.
Standout single ‘Lying’ is a track that is the most indicative of this newer approach, fusing a pitch-shifted vocal sample with a thrilling nu-disco pulse until a glitchy footwork coda moves the track and La Fine Equipe into fresh territory. It is this playful approach that defines the record, showing a group of producers who have learned their craft, studied their influences only to pull them apart and stick them back together in beguiling new shapes and forms.
The record also features thrilling guest spots including Georgia Anne Muldrow, signed to Flying Lotus’ prestigious Brainfeeder Records, on album highlight ‘Fonk Jedi ’ and upcoming French rapper ZeFire who appears on the hip-hop-inflected house cut ‘Typical’. It’s their eye for curation that adds another layer to this already multi-faceted record.
‘5th Season’ is a record that gathers the experience of four gifted producers and distils them into a record that is cohesive, inventive and full of propulsive floor-fillers. At a stage where most artists could sit still, rest on their laurels and play it safe, La Fine Equipe have embraced the new and the contemporary, creating a record that is set to be one of the defining statements of their career.
Listen to ‘5th Season’ here.
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