Collection: After Geography

After Caramel Room (2023), a highly promising EP, After Geography took their time before following through and releasing a debut album. Some fifty tour dates later, here comes A Hundred Mixed Emotions - ten songs that confirm the Lyon-born duo, now a quartet, has found the secret to perfect power pop: at times light or fragile, at others muscular or dreamlike.

The 2020 lockdown wasn’t all bad — it prompted Julien (guitar, vocals) and Nico (keyboards, bass, vocals) to start exchanging files and making music together again, after having played in the same band years before. In 2021, the duo, now calling themselves After Geography (the name comes from a Ringo Starr joke, you couldn’t make that up), played a first memorable show at Lyon’s legendary Transbordeur, as part of the La Messe de Minuit festival. The machine was in motion… and honed itself on stage all across France. For live performances, the duo expanded with the arrival of Arthur (guitar, bass, backing vocals) first, then Lalie (drums, percussion, backing vocals). Aiming for the long haul and working like true craftsmen of finely wrought pop, the band handled everything themselves on their two maxi-singles and EP. Along the way, they revealed a flair for melody and harmony : the foundation of deceptively retro compositions where their influences are absorbed with finesse, like a language they’ve made their own.

A language fully mastered, as evidenced by A Hundred Mixed Emotions, born from a creative back-and-forth between Julien and Nicolas. The song sketches only came to life in the studio, where they were played for the first time, before the songwriters and their producer, Julien Jussey, began trading arrangement ideas. And they certainly didn’t run out of them. We’re immediately swept up by the jangly pop-rock surge of “Hear Me Out,” a joyful opener quickly tempered by the fragile beauty of the title track that follows, encapsulating the mindset of a band reflecting on the eve of releasing its album into the world.

Over the course of forty minutes, After Geography blows hot and cold. From the catchy rock of “Slippin’ Away” to the poignant delicacy of a stripped-down ballad like “Over The Trees,” from the pure exhilaration of “She’s Magnetic” to the elegant lyricism of “A Certain Elation.”

There will surely be those eager to (once again) compare them to the Beatles... flattering, of course, but a bit too easy. A whole array of influences runs through the record, as diverse as The Strokes and Neil Young, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, or T. Rex. Yet a clear throughline remains: the pursuit of that perfect song, the one that lodges itself in your head after a single listen, that you hum without realizing it, because it’s already part of your musical landscape. The one we’ll all sing along to when After Geography hits the road again to bring their album to life on stage, across France and Europe in the months ahead.

Isabelle Chelley, Rock & Folk Magazine