Grief, Belgian Gothic, and the Trojan Horse of Dance Music: Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul Level Up

Their debut skewered BLM-era performativity with a smirk. The follow-up does something harder — it gets personal without losing the joke, and the joke without losing the grief.

Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul (born Boris Kor Tom Zeebroek, a name that itself sounds like a song title) make music that works like a Flemish relief carving: grotesque on the surface, allegorical underneath, and funnier than it has any right to be. Their second album, Mainland Madinina, arrives February 5 via Deewee, the obsidian-black Ghent studio of Soulwax, the brothers who first yoked these two together and who co-produce everything in the duo's catalog. The context for the record is loss. Zeebroek's mother died between albums; Adigéry's father, who had Alzheimer's, also died. They processed this by flying to Martinique — the Caribbean island Adigéry's parents emigrated from, whose Arawak name, Madinina, also happens to be the name of her mother's now-closed cocktail bar — and writing stripped-back acoustic demos on a hillside Airbnb. Zeebroek mimes cringing at this memory over steak tartare. The cringe is part of the method. What came out of Martinique is a deeper, more vulnerable version of their sound. The humor is still present — Googoo Gaga is a glam-funk ode to child-rearing that features Adigéry as wet nurse to an elderly white man, a visual that simultaneously nods to the actual 18th-century Flemish Mammelokker relief in Ghent's town square and to Belgium's extractive colonial history in the Congo. The eight-and-a-half-minute From Healer to Dealer skewers wellness culture through two alter egos, Ruben and Grace, whose compassionate conversation degrades into a screaming match of therapy buzzwords — inspired, apparently, by club bouncers who reinvented themselves as life coaches. This is what Adigéry and Zeebroek do: package social commentary inside pop with dance music DNA, then wait for the crowd to catch up. The Trojan Horse moment arrived on their first UK tour, when a Manchester crowd screamed back the chorus to Blenda — 'Go back to your country where you beloooooong!' — the satirical anti-racism anthem working exactly as intended, tears running down Zeebroek's face behind the monitors. That's the test they set for themselves with Topical Dancer, their 2022 debut: can politics and pop actually mix without the pop eating the politics, or the politics killing the pop? Manchester answered yes. Mainland Madinina raises the stakes by asking whether grief can share that same container. Mostly it can. The album is bookended by Restless at the opening and I'm Lost at the close — the latter a song in which Adigéry sings, or sing-talks, about finally throwing away flowers from her father's funeral. It is raw in a way that Topical Dancer was careful never to be, and that rawness is the album's real gamble. The duo built their audience on wit and ironic distance; Mainland Madinina asks that audience to stay when the irony recedes. The record is also a meditation on intergenerational inheritance — 'What's the trauma from my parents or my grandparents? What do I want to leave behind?' — which gives it a thematic coherence their debut, written on the road from song ideas plucked out of thin air, didn't quite have. Soulwax function here as what Zeebroek calls musical 'chiropractors' — always asking 'what's the real intention behind what you're writing?' — and the result is a record that sounds both expensive and intimate, all analogue synths and high-fidelity surfaces over acoustic bones. The Deewee studio, designed by architect Glenn Sestig, is an obsidian block with no signage; the music made inside it has a similar quality: entirely itself, identifiable from a single bar. Adigéry and Zeebroek are, in the most literal sense, Ghent locals — they cart their young families around on cargo bikes, they can't walk 50 metres without being stopped by someone's old babysitter or Soulwax's original drummer. That rootedness shows in the music: specific, place-aware, allergic to abstraction. The Mammelokker is their symbol — a grotesque that is also a tenderness, a provocation that is also a question. Would you breastfeed your own father? Think about it.