Angèle enlists Caroline Polachek and SebastiAn on ‘Love Triangle,’ the latest preview of her album ‘Instinct,’ out Oct. 16
The premise is in the title, and so is the casting. On “Love Triangle,” premiered on BBC Radio 1 and out now, Belgian pop star Angèle is caught between her two collaborators: Caroline Polachek, who turns up singing in French, and SebastiAn, the Ed Banger-affiliated producer supplying the beat. Three artists, one impossible choice, and an arrangement that makes the conceit structural rather than decorative.
The song came from eavesdropping. Angèle has said the idea arrived at a dinner in Brussels, where she overheard friends discussing a relationship involving three people. Curiosity did the rest.
A Beat With a Pedigree
SebastiAn’s production is the engine. It opens on a hypnotic synth figure with drums fading in and out and an 808 sitting low underneath, zippy and faintly sleazy, and it has drawn comparisons to Britney Spears’ Blackout era. That reading is accurate about the texture and slightly unfair to its actual lineage.
SebastiAn has spent two decades on Ed Banger, the Paris label that turned distorted, maximal French electro into a global export. “Love Triangle” sounds like a producer who knows precisely how much space a pop vocal needs and then withholds a little more of it. The build into the chorus sits deliberately dissonant, which is the correct decision. A song about not knowing where you stand has no business resolving comfortably.
Angèle frames that instability as the whole idea. The track plays with “the boundary between reality and fantasy,” she has said, never settling whether any of it is being lived or simply imagined. SebastiAn’s presence, she added, “allows the desire to become almost instinctive.”
Polachek’s Second Language
Polachek’s contribution is the most quietly interesting thing here. She alternates between French and English, wooing Angèle in Angèle’s own language, which reframes the role she usually occupies.
Polachek’s guest appearances have become a genre unto themselves over the past decade, from “New Shapes” with Charli xcx and Christine and the Queens to Flume’s “Sirens” and a long working relationship with Danny L Harle. In most of those she functions as texture, a voice deployed for its elasticity and its ability to make a track feel stranger than it is. Here she has an actual character to play, and she plays it as seduction rather than atmosphere. It is the difference between a feature and a performance.
She has not released a solo album since Desire, I Want to Turn Into You in 2023, though her presence on other people’s records has barely let up.
“Love Triangle” is the latest preview of Instinct, Angèle’s third album, out Oct. 16 via VL Records and Sony Music. It follows “What You Want” with Justice, “Dis-le” and “Une seule vie,” and the record also features Soulwax. Her last full-length, Nonante-Cinq, arrived in 2022.
That guest list is worth noticing. Justice, Soulwax, SebastiAn: Angèle has built this album around the architects of French and Belgian dance music rather than the Anglo-American pop production circuit that usually absorbs a European star at this stage of a career. It is a regional alignment made at a moment when most crossover attempts point in one direction only.
The song itself refuses to pick. It ends the way these situations usually end in real life, with the tension intact and nobody having decided anything. Which is the honest outcome, and the more danceable one.
