A Magnificent Exercise in Futility
Twenty years, a shelf of albums, three languages — and a Parisian who long ago stopped trying to belong.
There is a particular kind of honesty that only arrives once ambition has been tried and found wanting. Sydney Valette has been making music for twenty years. He has passed through a long line of independent labels, sung in three languages, and arrived at a settled indifference to whether any of it adds up to a career. This autumn Artoffact Records puts out his ninth album, and the title is blunt enough to invite suspicion: I Fucking Love You.
The bluntness is the joke, and Valette gets there before anyone else can. Most of his songs are about romantic failure, he says, and so are almost everyone else’s. What he has written is not a love song but a farce about love songs, and about the whole machinery of romantic feeling that modern music runs on. His own phrase for it is the best thing in the interview below: a magnificent exercise in futility. The gesture is grand, and it changes nothing, and he makes it anyway.
That double register turns up somewhere less expected as well. Asked what Russian gives him that French and English cannot — he has been singing in it since Город Болит in 2019, and returns to it here with “Как Свеча” — Valette describes a temperament rather than a language: grave, extreme, masochistic, and mixed up with buffoonery and absurd madness. People who are gentle and violent at once. It is, almost word for word, a description of his own records. The Russian songs are not decoration. They are the same instinct, working in another language.
The trajectory behind all this is stranger than a career. At twenty-five, on the strength of his first two albums, he briefly had television and radio, and no equipment to speak of. Within months the label and the manager were gone and he was starting over. What he singles out from the years since is not exposure but two working relationships: Mike Theis at Yuk-Fü Records, who put in the time and taught him something, and the booking agency Persona Grata, which from 2021 let him actually live off the work. He is unsentimental about the rest of the industry, and notably free of bitterness toward it.
Nine albums in, what sustains him is the form itself rather than any scene. He compares making an album to writing a book, and says plainly that he doesn’t care about genre or belonging. The proof is a throwaway line about putting Zumba on one track and Gabber on the next. Coming from someone who watched recognition arrive and evaporate inside a year, that freedom reads less as provocation than as the only sane conclusion available.
On Russian
Your biography traces a fascination with Russian culture back to childhood, and it runs through your lyrics from “Город Болит” in 2019 to “Как Свеча” on the new album. Beyond that initial fascination, what does Russian let you say or feel that French and English don’t?
I don’t know, probably the same thing. I love the language and Slavic culture in general. There’s definitely an emotional quality you can’t find anywhere else — a grave, extreme, masochistic depth mixed with buffoonery, an absurd madness. They’re people who are very gentle and very violent at the same time.
On the title track
“I Fucking Love You” is an almost disarmingly direct title for a coldwave and EBM record, a genre more used to solemnity or mystery. Was breaking that code deliberate, or did it just come naturally? And the track itself — where did it come from? A story, a person, a particular moment, or more a way of summing up the spirit of the album?
It’s several things at once. It’s inspired by my life, obviously — by a way of loving intensely, for better and for worse. But it’s also a kind of tragicomic farce, in the sense that most of my songs are about romantic failures, like 99% of songs, really. It’s a way of summing up the romantic culture of modern music: a strong message that is very alive and completely ridiculous at the same time, like a magnificent exercise in futility.
On the road here
Over fifteen years you’ve been through a good number of independent labels and crossed paths with plenty of artists — Blind Delon, Rebeka Warrior, The Shelter, Supernova 1006. Looking back at that road up to Artoffact today, which encounters or which stages mattered most to you, and why?
There were the first and second albums, when at twenty-five I thought I was going to become a famous pop artist, because within six months I found myself doing television and radio, coming out of nowhere, without even a microphone or a synth or speakers. That’s what’s beautiful about it too: you need almost nothing. There’s no point trying to be known, to break through. It just landed on me like that, and then it was taken away as fast as it came. I wasn’t ready, and within a few months the label and the manager dropped me, and I started again from zero.
The third album, Other Side, was very important to me, because it was the confirmation of my “conversion” to coldwave.
My work with Yuk-Fü Records and its founder Mike Theis was formative, because Mike put a lot into it and taught me a lot. It was really good to feel supported as an artist, to go and work in his studio instead of staying shut away at home. And signing with Persona Grata for booking in 2021 changed a lot for me, because I could actually make a living from it.
And then, well, here we are — I’m on my ninth album now. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, I’ve seen a few eras go by now, ha. I love making albums, telling stories in sound, like writing a book. I don’t care about style, I don’t care about belonging to a scene. If I feel like doing Zumba on track 1 and Gabber on track 2, I’m not going to stop myself.
Sydney Valette’s next shows :
06/11 Charleroi, BE @rockerill
07/11 Paris, FR @la_marbrerie
11/11 Bochum, DE @die.trompete
12/11 Leipzig, DE @moritzbastei
13/11 Bielefeld, DE Movie
14/11 Berlin, DE @lidoberlin
17/11 Luzern, CH @sedelmusikzentrum
18/11 Munich, DE @clubrotesonne
19/11 Bratislava, SK @pink_whale_cultc
21/11 Prague, CZ @futurummusicbar
22/11 Vienna, AT @fluccvienna
27/11 Warsaw, PL @klubchmury
Sydney Valette’s I Fucking Love You is out October 2, 2026 on Artoffact Records, on limited vinyl, CD and digital.
Photos : Vanessa Ruckh. Album artwork courtesy of Artoffact Records. All images remain the property of their respective rights holders.
Text © Ian Joy / Catastrophe Ballet, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
