True DIY indie-singer songwriter, elie zoé releases their first album under their real name, the one they chose, the first carried by their reclaimed voice after transitioning last year.

Shifting forms, their fourth studio album, follows in the line of the minimally instrumented pop and rock aesthetics of their previous works. This collection of nine songs, built on the branches of a fifteen-year body of work, is the new treehouse from where the artist invites us to observe an unfamiliar landscape: one of metamorphosis, of alignment, of another way of inhabiting the world.

shifting forms is an initiatory journey, a slow organic transformation rooted in the living. Everything here is interconnection, dialogue between beings, porosity of boundaries. It is a record that lets names, contours, and forms blur to better reinvent their power. The songs work like a ritual, proposing to shed old costumes and their fictions to go into the forest to find new names.

The first step for elie zoé was to relearn how to sing and to create a zone of hospitality together with musician and producer Louis Jucker. Long-time companions, they built a new recording studio using salvaged materials in the premises of Humus Records label in La Chaux-de-Fonds. These projects unfolded in parallel: setting up this safe space where songs could be born freely, and the composition of melodies allowing elie zoé to reclaim their instrument. This do-it-yourself approach remains vital to the self-taught artist.

When it came time to record with Louis Jucker’s vintage microphones and analog effects, drummer Luc Hess (Coilguns, Beurre) joined the adventure. His sparse and gritty playing finds resonance either in elie zoé’s earthy guitars or in their wide, generous pianos. Mixed by Louis Jucker and elie zoé, then mastered by Johann Meyer (Gojira), the album both burns and soothes. It is a free manifesto, raw, simple and direct.[info sheet from distr.]