Jessica93 - 666 tours de periph‘ (2025)
By Flork
Jessica93‘s 666 tours de périph‘, released earlier this year in July 2025, arrives like a black-lit silhouette of Paris—an album that feels solitary and sprawling, much like the city of lights itself, yet handmade and monolithic in its ambient mystique late at night after dark. Geoffroy Laporte‘s one-man project (on this album; several musicians have joined and left since the 2000s) has always thrived on tension between intimacy and enormity, but here that tension becomes a defining pulse. The record‘s darkness isn‘t theatrical but rather lived-in, like the hum of streetlamps at 3 a.m. when the city is too tired to pretend. I’m immediately enchanted within the first seconds of Florence Rey, and it‘s clear that Geoffroy is sinking deeper than before into the industrial shoegaze current he‘s quietly shaped for over a decade. The opening track is trance-like, pulling the listener into a slow and downward spiral of looping guitars and thick atmosphere. Yes, it‘s dark, but its darkness arrives with a dose of gravity much like an invitation rather than a wall with „No Entry“ posted on its gate.
Bébé Requin follows, shifting from vocal hypnosis to a fully instrumental dreamstate. This track (and many of the others) is built on a driving but understated drum-machine beat. However, the track is repetitive in the way great minimalism is: always moving and always changing in subtle and inconspicuous motions. The hi-hat whispers above layers of guitar that glint like distant metal reflections, creating something strangely beautiful and strangely cold. By the time Le Grand Remplacement begins, the album has already laid down its emotional vocabulary: industrial desolation, shoegaze haze, and melodic melancholy, but I have to say that this third track pushes harder. The vocals stretch into long, indistinct harmonies that become another instrument rather than a narrative. In fact, the song evokes the feeling of working overtime in a factory you hate, unsure when you‘ll finally be allowed to go home. Around the two-minute mark, heavier guitars crash in and the high-pitched melodies sharpen the emotional edge. It‘s one of those songs that manages to be both punishing yet beautiful though all its ambient washes of sounds.
La colline du crack offers a different kind of heaviness. This track is quieter and more wounded. Its shoegaze leanings make it one of the album‘s most emotionally direct moments, supported by a forlorn vocal performance that is half-buried in ambient echoes. The video on YouTube shows Geoffroy simply staring back at the camera for the duration of the song from the passenger seat of a car up front. Yet for some reason, it all makes sense: the music feels like that same unbroken gaze, reflective but impossible to read entirely. For me, however, the centerpiece is Frappe Chirurgicale, a track that fuses industrial grit, post-punk cool, and a rhythmic catchiness that borders on addictive. You can hear (or at least I think I did) shades of Kraftwerk in the mechanical precision, as well as hints of Die Ärzte and Nina Hagen in the tonal attitude, even a contemporary French darkness reminiscent of Alcest or Amesoeurs. Yet none of these comparisons diminish the album‘s uniqueness. 666 tours de périph’ isn‘t retro industrial nor Berlin‘s 90s machine-music revival but instead something distinctly Parisian, distinctly 2025, and distinctly Jessica93. The closing track, Purifier, seals the experience with a blend of beauty and despair that keeps echoing long after the final note.
And the Flork‘s prognosis? This album is an amazing example of production and creative vision. Every element—from the distorted bass textures to the looping guitar motifs—feels sharpened and expressive. Geoffroy Laporte has always used limitation as a creative engine, yet here, those limitations reverberate like liberation. 666 tours de périph’ is heavy without melodrama. It‘s an album built from darkness, yet shaped with such care and inventiveness that it ends up luminous. When in the hands of Jessica93, even the bleakest landscapes can become breathtaking.
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