Ahead of the release of her new album Celebrate, which drops on March 22 via Heavenly Recordings, Halo Maud shares her new single “My Desire Is Pure.”

Commentating on the track Halo Maud says: “The song is built around the ascending melody found in the refrain and also the phrase which became the title. I realized, once the song was completed, that it was constructed resembling a mountain: an ascending and descending melody providing relief, an arid guitar riff like boulders. And there is space: there aren’t many words and each sung phrase is punctuated by an instrumental motif, flowerbeds, a grove. From the vocals flow the desire, a pure and clear water source pouring into a stream. The stream watering the green prairies below. Desire as a source of life, freshness, creativity, perpetual movement. I adore this state of insatiability which compels me forward. I wanted to say that I live as a function of my desires, and that this desire never ends but transforms, into love, into songs, into a walk in the forest.”

On the video she adds: “Mountains have always been a magical place for me, triggering an instant feeling of fullness. Hence I asked Adrien Selbert to go filming in the French Alps. We wanted whiteness, of course, the symbolic purity of the snow. Physical effort and animality. We wanted almost nothing, except an unexpected outcome.”

Celebrate arrives a few months after For That Beautiful Feeling, the tenth album by The Chemical Brothers that Maud provided vocals for much of (including two of the lead singles – Live Again and Skipping Like A Stone with Beck, as well as the albums’ hazy title track). While that band’s influence might not be obvious on Celebrate, their dedication to pulling glorious psychedelic sounds out of the whatever instrumentation they find is very much in evidence. In the case of Iceberg – a cover of Fred Frith’s blissful Anthropocene hymn recorded with fellow French artist Flavien Berger – that’s instrumentation is mainly just a pair of human voices against a swirling beatless ambient backdrop. The result is utterly intoxicating.

“After I discovered the album Nous Autres by Rene Lussier and Fred Frith, I started recording my voice alone, rough, then constructed everything around it like a puzzle. Flute pieces pitched, displaced, interspersed. It was a solitary and chaotic process and extremely galvanizing. Then I dreamed, once again. This time I saw Flavien Berger in a kind of strange festival. I took it as a sign and wrote him the next day. And he told me, ‘I listened to it often. I heard it in my dreams.’”

Halo Maud
Celebrate
Heavenly Recordings

1. Celebrate
2. Terres Infinies
3. My Desire Is Pure
4. Last Day Song
5.Slowly Surely
6. Catch The Wave
7. Le Ciel Est Grand
8. You Float (feat Greg Saunier)
9. A Te Voir
10. Iceberg (feat Flavien Berger)
11. Pesnopoïka1
12. Entends – Tu Ma Voix

Order Celebrate by Halo Maud HERE