*Edition of 300* Hélas is the sound of a small, stubborn world refusing to disappear. Collecting 15 songs from Neoboris, an infamous Bordeaux/Pau duo who burned through the late ’90s and early ’00s, the album plays like a time capsule cracked open after years in storage, its colours somehow brighter for having been sealed away. This is boy‑and‑girl music about boys, but it’s also about scenes, hormones, back rooms and provincial train lines – the shared geography of a South‑West France where punk, cold wave, rave culture and variété française kept bumping into each other in cheap clubs and rehearsal spaces.
The origin story reads like an archetype, but the details make it sting. One half of Neoboris came out of hardcore raves and Bordeaux punk bands, carrying the raw‑throated urgency of that milieu; the other, Boris, grew up on New Wave and goth, a born songwriter whose melancholic streak ran as deep as his knack for hooks. Together they found a common altar in Elli et Jacno, Taxi Girl, Mathématiques Modernes – that peculiarly French intersection where cheap drum machines, fragile synth lines and deadpan vocals can suddenly break your heart. Out of that devotion came a duo aesthetic: compact songs, simple structures, lyrics that flirt with kitsch and then side‑step into something sharper, all delivered with the kind of chemistry you can’t rehearse into existence.
Live, they treated stages from Bordeaux and Pau to Paris as temporary safe zones, places to be too earnest and too theatrical at once. The shows were wild in the way that only under‑funded, over‑feeling gigs can be: feedback squeal, rushed tempos, voices occasionally cracking, the two of them radiating that mix of shyness and bravado you get when you’re singing your secrets out loud. Hélas gathers the studio and home‑recorded echoes of that era and orders them into an emotional arc – from rush to comedown, infatuation to regret, celebration to elegy. The production sits right on the fault line between DIY and pop: drum machines slightly out of time, synth presets pushed into unexpected shapes, guitars toggling between brittle and blissed, all wrapped around melodies that would sound just as right on a transistor radio as in a squat.
The shadow that hangs over the record is Boris’s death in 2008, a break so abrupt it turned the entire project into unfinished business. The surviving member’s decision to keep singing these songs “everywhere I can” isn’t nostalgia, it’s a refusal to let that voice vanish into footnote status. Hélas makes that refusal tangible: 15 tracks that re‑situate Neoboris not as local cult trivia but as part of a larger, messy history of queer‑coded, under‑the‑radar French pop. You hear the mourning in the title, of course, but the music itself leans hard into joy – messy, melancholy, shoulder‑to‑shoulder joy, the kind you find on cramped dance floors at four in the morning. Singing with him then, now, and forever: Hélas documents that promise in all its scruffy, luminous detail.
