La mort des étoiles

Editors’ Notes It felt like Quebec's Mélanie and Stéphanie Boulay came out of nowhere when their strikingly spare debut, Le poids des confettis, won two Félix Awards in 2013, including Album of the Year for the folk genre. Their ethereal harmonies and honest songwriting hit on something enchanting, and they immediately went about refining those elements on 2015’s 4488 de l’amour. Following the two sisters' busy 2018 (Mélanie had a baby and Stéphanie released a solo album), there’s a spirit of renewal that runs through La mort des étoiles (“Death of the Stars”), which yields some of their prettiest songs yet.

All but gone are the guitars and banjos that were once so central to the Boulays' albums, replaced by piano, horns, and strings. "Nous après nous" asks existential questions about how to live life when the end of the world is fast approaching. The lullaby-like title track picks up the thread with a hint of hope, two voices intertwining in the chorus to wonder, "If everything falls, who will rise to look at the stars?" And Mélanie gets intimate on "Léonard," a delicate hymn in which she professes profound love for her newborn son while leaving him free to forge his own path into the unknown.