There's a version of Angèle Van Laeken that would have pivoted hard toward English-language pop, chased a crossover, smoothed out the edges. Instinct is emphatically not that record. Where her 2021 Nonante-Cinq opened with a love letter to Brussels and fretted about Belgian constitutional fracture, this third album brings in Justice, Soulwax, and Caroline Polachek as collaborators — names that carry weight in certain Anglo-American circles — without surrendering the artistic logic that makes her worth caring about. The collaborations are mostly excellent. Justice's What You Want lands a collision between maximalist rave synths and glitterbeat stomp that neither party has quite done before. Soulwax's Trop earns its noise — electronics with genuine edge, vocals that lurch between near-rap and scrambled incomprehensibility, a house pulse that doesn't behave. Love Triangle with Caroline Polachek and SebastiAn deploys a thrillingly discordant synthesiser arpeggio over a killer chorus with a sweaty-small-hours mood. These are not cameos. They are genuine co-constructions. The more revealing moments, though, are the solo pivots. On Verra starts as a standard piano ballad with a chanson-adjacent melody, then gets strafed with bursts of static and machine-gun-paced noise. Je Compte drifts sweetly for two minutes before slamming into a four-to-the-floor rhythm loaded with sampled gasps and warped vocals, then detours again into lo-fi piano. These are not random genre hops — they read as someone who finds the locked-in predictability of modern pop genuinely intolerable and keeps grabbing the wheel. Tout Décider is an unequivocal earworm, the melody floating above chugging synths in a way that suggests Angèle could write a straightforward pop hit any time she chose. The fact that she mostly chooses otherwise is the record's central tension. F4ck 4ever doesn't justify its title. Dis-le's AutoTuned hook sits in an uncomfortable middle ground between unusual and tinnily annoying. These aren't catastrophic failures, but they do interrupt the album's momentum in ways that matter over a full listen. The language barrier question hangs over all of this, and it's worth saying plainly: Instinct is not a concerted Anglo-American push. There are more English lyrics than on Nonante-Cinq, but the record's logic remains Francophone. Angèle broke Stromae's record for the most weeks at No 1 in Belgium with her 2018 debut single Tout Oublier, which appeared on a debut album that went seven times platinum in Belgium. Her closest brush with British visibility was a 2020 feature on Dua Lipa's Fever, a minor hit. Nothing here changes that calculus dramatically. What it does is make the case that the British audience missing her work is losing something real. The honest structural problem is album coherence. This plays better as a source of playlist highlights than as a front-to-back listen. The moments of genuine strangeness — the On Verra gear-shifts, the Soulwax noise, the Love Triangle late-night ache — are punctuated by tracks that feel like they belong to a safer, more conventional release. The ratio tips toward interesting often enough to matter, but not consistently enough to make the whole thing feel inevitable.
