Montreal’s Bleu Jeans Bleu have kept busy since the phenomenal success of “Coton ouaté” and taking home the Group of the Year award at the ADISQ Gala in 2019. Known for their humorous vibe, the band combines musical genres and references like you’d coordinate dishes at a potluck dinner. Top Minou, their fourth album, rides a wave of joyous insouciance. “Bleu albums are generally pretty much like a pizza,” principal singer-songwriter Mathieu Lafontaine tells Apple Music. “There’s no predefined style. We didn’t want to be labelled, so we’d be free to go wherever we liked. So when we have an idea, it’s full steam ahead.” With fellow musicians François Lessard, Mathieu Collette, and Pierre-David Girard, Lafontaine blends tales of ice cream, sandwiches, swimming pools and crazy carpets in a happy-go-lucky mishmash of songs. “There’s a feel-good energy to it,” he says. “It’s an everyday album, whether it’s freezing outside or not.” Here he talks through all of the album’s songs. Bacon en bedaine “Frying bacon when you’re shirtless is painful. When the party kicks off in the frying pan, you realize it’s an extreme sport. I wanted to talk about that and we set it to music that’s a mix of The Raconteurs and Led Zeppelin, on a background of sizzling fat. I want people to feel that twinge of tension you get when your chest gets splattered with piping hot oil. It’s the first Bleu track that starts a cappella, with a cry from the heart that nicely sets the stage. We used really rock guitar, and totally embraced the style.” Molle twist vanille-vanille “I figured a tune about ice cream would make everyone happy. When people French kiss a soft serve ice cream, there’s all-round happiness. For the energy, I thought of the young Beatles: tunes with a bit of drive, a sort of unbridled energy, where there’s a lot of buzzing, with a hi-hat [Charleston] that’s quite loud. It was perfectly clear it would be our first single.” La pure pureté du beurre pur 100% pur beurre “In the days when I worked at the Isle de Garde microbrewery [in Montreal] with PB [bassist Pierre-David Girard], we’d see a lot of advertisements with the word ‘pure’. We started sending each other photos of everything we came across. It tied in with the whole debate about butter and margarine. And, as is often the case with Bleu Jeans Bleu, when we come up with a string of words like ‘la pure pureté du beurre pur 100% pur beurre’ [the pure purity of 100%-pure pure butter], it makes for a great playground for composing. Musically, it’s a little neo-eighties, a little darksynth, with a Van Halen-style solo and a bit of rock in the middle: in other words, it sounds buttery smooth.” Coco de cuir “I started to go bald in college and I didn’t like it one bit, the whole process of losing my hair, finding ways to hide it, agonizing over it all. I’ve already done a song about it on a solo project [Matt Track] as a way of playing down what I’d been though. ‘Coco de cuir’ is the more advanced, more full-on version. I’m fine with it all now, but I thought that, if I’d heard that song when I was like 24, I might have taken the whole experience with a grain of salt. For the aesthetics, I added a bit of soul. It reminds me of Silk Sonic’s swing, with tenderness.” Permis de moto “I’ve noticed that motorcycles and midlife crises sometimes go hand in hand. Guys hit 50 and figure they’ll start biking. I painted a picture of the guy nearing retirement who wonders if it’ll rekindle the spark. He gets this fleeting glimpse of what his life would be like if he got his motorcycle licence. There’s a power pop aesthetic in the refrain, bordering on cheesy, with the brass that kicks in at the end to add an extra layer of cheesiness. This song is that kind of guilty pleasure.” Blue jeans blues “There’s a large percentage of people who truly can’t say ‘Bleu Jeans Bleu’. It’s as though, when the word comes out of their mouth, they instinctively turn ‘bleu’ into ‘blue’. So, it’s become a running joke with the band and we figured we should do a ‘Blue jeans blues’. It’s a riff we use for our sound checks, just for a laugh. Plus, it’s a blues in seven beats, so it’s like starting off with a blues structure and then taking a pickaxe to it and cutting one out to turn it into a prog rock tune. We wanted to include two commas on the album, simple, short songs, so there’s this one and ‘Top minou’. It’s somewhat inspired by The Carnival by Wyclef [Jean], which features loads of delectable interludes. I kept saying to myself that I would have liked them to have been full-length tracks. I thought it would interesting to do the same thing on our album.” Souper fondue “There’s something really comforting about a fondue dinner with adults when the kids are in bed. At my place, we fold out the sofa bed and have dinner in bed. And when we do, it’s fun, it’s like a date, it can replace many things. It’s a slow, unhurried tune, and we used an organ, which we haven’t often done, apart from on ‘J’ai mangé trop de patates frites’ [Perfecto, 2019]. It’s like a power ballad, but without too much electric guitar. The extra creamy theme moves me, there’s something super tender about it.” Y’a quelqu’un qui a botché mon sandwich “It’s obvious to someone who spends a lot of time on the road that they botch your sandwich whenever you use the drive-thru. That feeling you get when you open the bag and see this thing that’s all wonky, put together any old how… the lack of love that goes into the assembly of sandwiches is rife! We laugh about it a lot on tour, so I thought: ‘Why not do an angry kind of rock, with a super drum roll at the end to simulate a sandwich accident?’ People who eat in their car will totally be able to relate.” Swing dans piscine “One day, I was chatting with a neighbour. It was getting late and he was wondering: ‘Do we give the kids their bath or do we just chuck ’em in the swimming pool?’ When you spend the summer in the pool, I get the impression you take a lot fewer showers. Because there’s quite a high chlorine content, you feel as though you’re clean, even if that’s not really the case. I thought I’d write a scenario about two guys who sort of tend to do that. Like one of Nirvana’s songs, the verses are a bit flimsy but the refrain builds up like crazy and you start getting screamed at. The type of rhythm and guitar theme at the end of the song has the same effect on me as the blue album by Weezer, a band I’ve always been a huge fan of.” Top minou “An album’s title track is usually a big deal, the cornerstone. Here, it’s the shortest one. Again, the idea came from an old joke: marking the time of a reggae tune, and then starting if off at full throttle. Bob Marley did this a lot at his shows. It’s all messed up, but everybody’s together, so it’s ‘top minou’ [too sweet]. And I find it amusing that that’s all we say in the lyrics. We recorded it very late at night after a few too many glasses of wine, and the end result is exactly what I had in mind. As soon as it starts sounding anything like a song, that disappears.” Crazy carpet “During the pandemic, we went for a lot of walks in the neighbourhood. Ever since we’d moved there, I’d been swamped with work, it was at the peak [of success] of ‘Coton ouaté’, and it seemed as though there were loads of families I’d never seen before. It was a really cold day and my neighbour had just finished building a little slide in his backyard; I slid down and strained so hard in order to stay on my stomach that I got a cramp in one of the muscles in my back. As I was getting to my feet, I said ‘Yeah, well, crazy carpets aren’t for the faint-hearted!’ and it was clear I had to do a song about it. It starts off really slowly, before exploding with a refrain full of hope. We thought the crescendo was a great way to wrap up the album.”