Bibi Club are a band that everyone should know.
Canadian indie musical duo, comprised of Adèle Trottier-Rivard on vocals and keyboard and Nicolas Basque on guitar, have released their third album Amaro. Their previous record, Feu de garde, saw them lean into darker, deeper textures. On Amaro, those textures remain, guiding the album as it moves through the darkness of loss and toward the light of rediscovering a will to live.
It’s been a difficult time for Bibi Club, who lost two loved ones in the past year. That weight is felt throughout Amaro, which draws on dark electronica and neo-folk to create a kind of forlorn disco. Given the stylistic roots of Bibi Club, the result is deeply effective.
Amaro is a very raw album, and over the course of just over 32 minutes you might feel like you need to cry, lulled into its hypnotic, pulsing beats and repeated lyrical mantras such as “I remember your eyes/I remember your eyes,” “I want to live/I want to live,” and “la mort et la vie/et la vie”.
The album starts off strong with the sparse “Infinité,” which creates a gentle sense of foreboding with its extremely minimal drum loop, jangly guitar, ghostly background harpsichord, and singer Adèle Trottier-Rivard high, echoing vocals. Amaro is about “braving the dark beasts that shadow beneath us”, and the beginning of the album very much feels like meeting the beasts for the first time and realising you’re going to have to fight them.
It slides perfectly into lead track “Amaro,” whose lyrics poignantly translate into “the heart is a place that never dies.”
If it wasn’t clear that Bibi Club have been having a difficult time, this track is one of the ones that makes it abundantly clear. It has the vibe of gathering strength before having to do something difficult, and lyrically feels similar to reciting self-soothing words in order to make things easier.
That’s the overall tone of Amaro: in darkness, now is the time to live bravely and fiercely, even if it hurts — and especially if it’s scary.
The interlude instrumental track “Le Styx” is a good example of this. Like its namesake, it feels like a dark yet gentle journey down a winding river, as you prepare yourself to face something that will likely be difficult to confront, even though you have no choice.
The background choral chanting elevates this short track, adding a sense of divinity in a way that only choral vocalisations can achieve so simply and effectively. Similar harmonies are also used beautifully at the end of “Les vagues,” as vocalist Adèle Trottier-Rivard and Nicolas Basque sing together in a ghostly way that brings the track to a longing close.
Although Amaro leans more toward indie dance than anything else, there are still moments where the dance rhythms fall away. One track that does this is “Le château,” which instead opts for a gentle, lonely guitar melody alongside the vocals, with added percussion used more as sound effects than as part of the melody.
The song is deeply sad and very dark, with the vocals repeating “L'amour survit à la mort” (love survives death). It’s clearly a sentiment Bibi Club understand well: that love for someone doesn’t end the moment they’re gone. Instead, it stays with you — something you carry, even though, and perhaps because, it hurts.
There is also a touch of Stereolab in Amaro, which isn’t surprising considering Bibi Club’s previous cover of the group’s single “Orgiastic.”
Like Stereolab, Bibi Club rely on looping sounds and vocals that remain within a tight tonal range, creating a hypnotic atmosphere you could listen to for hours without interruption.
Amaro doesn’t carry the same kind of defeated optimism that Stereolab often bring — that sense that things will be fine because they could be worse. Instead, Bibi Club convey something slightly different: the feeling that you move through difficult times because things have been worse before, and there is simply no other option.
The final single released ahead of the album is “George Sand,” named after the 19th-century French feminist and journalist George Sand. The track opens with frantic guitar and a characteristically sparse drum loop, accompanied by atonal trumpets that reinforce its restless energy.
According to Bibi Club, “George Sand” was inspired by the writer’s “forest manifesto,” tied to her work in botany: “this song is inspired by her manifesto for the survival of the Fontainebleau forest, an ode to life and nature, to the plants and trees that guide us. A song full of thirst for life, about the force of nature and the therapeutic benefits it provides.”
Amaro’s second leading track is “Washing Machine,” a song which is explicitly about the loss of a relative. This song is, in a word, absolutely devastating.
The grief that runs through the rest of the album comes to a head here. The song reflects on photos of the child, Tobie, his favourite books, and his fascination with the track’s title, the washing machine.
At one point, the lyrics ask plainly, “Where do we go, after the death of our child?” It’s an impossible question, made even more devastating by the line “I will be your mother till the very end.” The moment is haunting, and anyone listening to Amaro could be forgiven for needing a moment to recover after listening to it.
The album closes with two tracks: the slow-moving, starkly echoing “La bête en colère” and the fuzzy “The Pine on the Corner.” The latter opens with plodding keyboard and a layer of static as the vocals sing “we all keep staring at the wall” over clear, jangly guitar.
After much of the album’s frenetic dance energy, it feels fitting to end on a song that moves slowly and deliberately like this — at least until the drums and bass arrive halfway through, lifting the track and bringing the album to a more hopeful close.
The lyrics, “people die / people know / we all keep staring at the wall,” echo the old adage that in the midst of life we are in death — a reminder that loss is something everyone will encounter, and that even in the hardest moments, the choice is how to keep going.
Amaro is a difficult album in many ways. It’s sparse, dark, and steeped in pain and grief, and listeners could be forgiven for finding it emotionally challenging.
However, to ignore it would be a disservice. Its themes are handled with striking care and emotional honesty, carried forward by dance rhythms and restrained, monophonic vocals that make the impact even stronger.
Amaro is both difficult and beautiful, and it’s the kind of record that lingers long after it ends — as it should.
