Autour de Lucie: A pop ballad does not seek the deceased in heaven, but in the gaze

Paris – 23 July 2026: Sometimes an unassuming title is enough to open up an entire landscape. “Quelque part” – meaning: somewhere – is the title of the ballad that Franceinfo once again highlights in its summer series on female voices in the new French chanson and pop scene. Autour de Lucie does not sketch a heaven with fixed coordinates. Rather, the afterlife remains a vague, painfully close zone: a place where a loved one might be, yet remains unreachable.

Singer Valérie Leulliot begins after a first day without the deceased. Between the desert and Niagara, one of the vivid lines says, she drifts like flower pollen and speaks with her pain. This contrast between dryness and abundance carries the song: grief here is neither a dramatic pose nor a private confession, but a state of fluctuating perception. Even language falls out of rhythm, between clarity and gibberish.

“Quelque part” opens the album “Hors monde”, released in May. The record is dedicated to Leulliot’s father, who died during its creation. This gives the address to an absent you biographical gravity without confining it to a single meaning. The song leaves open whether it tells of death, a separation, or simply the silencing of a connection. It is precisely this careful ambiguity that makes it so affecting.

Founded in Paris in 1993, Autour de Lucie was already among those French acts in the 1990s that did not confuse pop with volume. Today, Leulliot and Sébastien Lafargue form the core of the project. Their new material continues the group’s longstanding art: melodies are allowed to shimmer, guitars and electronic colours to draw closer, yet the arrangement never becomes an end in itself. The voice remains the place where everything comes together.

That is also the subtle contradiction of “Quelque part”: the song is about loss, yet it refuses the heavy tread. The chorus returns to the idea that the other person is still somewhere, distant and yet within one’s own gaze. Clouds drift by slowly; images of memory do not erase reason, but make it porous. Pop music can easily tip such lines into sentimentality; Leulliot holds them in suspension with calm warmth.

That Franceinfo takes up the piece in a series about female singers is therefore more than a nostalgic rediscovery. In “Quelque part”, an artist speaks not on behalf of others, but from a distinctive perspective on farewell. For Autour de Lucie, the geography of what comes after has no map, no religious certainty and no grand effect. It consists of gazes, clouds and the attempt to endure the next day. That is little – and, as is so often the case in good songs, astonishingly much.