Across his decade-long body of work, Rahim Redcar—the artist known until now as Christine and the Queens—has tangled in the interplay between sexual and spiritual surrender. A dynamic, expressive singer, he’s nurtured a perennial fascination with the ways those experiential extremes play out across the body—how the diaphragm lurches when an encounter with the divine drops you to your knees, how the thrill of an irrepressible attraction can catch in your throat. He’s no stranger to being overcome.
Though tinges of dance music have embellished Redcar’s music for years, like the acid bass on “Feel So Good” and the echoing polyrhythms on “Je Te Vois Enfin,” he’s largely worked inside a glossy, midtempo pop mode. Most of his songs wouldn’t sound out of place in a downtown coffee shop or chic new bar, but probably wouldn’t inspire anyone to break a sweat in a club basement. With his new album HOPECORE, Redcar seeds physical abandon into the beat. For the first time, he plunges into dancefloor reverie across the length of an LP. It leads him to some of the most impassioned vocal performances he’s ever put to disc.
Following two knotty concept albums, 2022’s Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) and last year’s collaborator-studded triple LP Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, HOPECORE is refreshingly immediate. Redcar produced and mixed the record on his own, undertaking what he called “an absolute quest where no one else came in to tamper with intentions.” He’s a reverential student of house music history, seizing on the idea of club as church from Frankie Knuckles’ sets at Chicago’s Warehouse in the 1980s and tracing it through the starry-eyed remixes of George Michael and Erasure singles that turned dancefloors into planetariums through the 1990s.
What better setting is there to sing unfettered about the embodied pleasures and existential terrors of gay sex? After a handful of somewhat elusive tracks that sound less like the announcement of a new era and more like we’ve tuned into an obscure dance night where the DJ is still getting warmed up, HOPECORE kicks into gear with “DEEP HOLES.” A throbbing kick, burbling vocal chops, and classic house piano accompany Redcar on his noble hunt for hole. “From the tip of your soul to the flesh of my eye,” he sings in an intoxicating lead melody that eases beautifully into the depths of his range. “Say my name as I’m inside.” He’s never sounded so assured or delighted in his hunger as he does here.
Historically, dance producers tend to work with other people’s voices, weaving vocal lines into a beat at a remove. They don’t often carry the somatic memory of singing the songs they’re crafting. As both producer and singer on HOPECORE, Redcar populates a universe by himself. This expansive solitude has its advantages, as on the album’s 20-minute centerpiece “OPERA - I UNDERSTAND,” where a queasy beat mutates beneath intersecting layers of his searching voice. It’s a beautiful, harrowing track that drags Redcar’s voice to such a rich place that I wonder if he didn’t record most of it in a single take, letting himself get tired, letting the vulnerability of exhaustion color his words. The vocals and instrumentals bleed into each other in perfect communion, a symbiosis likely catalyzed by Redcar’s dual role. But some of the album’s early tracks, like the slick, pounding “INS8DE OF ME,” play a little flat due to this one-man operation’s lack of parallax.
On the bilingual “RED BIRDMAN EMERGENCY” (a callback to Redcar les adorables étoiles’s “My Birdman"), Redcar’s echoing harmonies shower down over minor-key strings and a marching beat. It’s all tension and gritted teeth—“I don’t know to express further the anger I have,” Redcar sings, “against this world who keep on playing us small.” His voice sounds as dislocated as his grammar, shadowed in reverb under a menacing bassline as he snarls against the marginalization of queer life. Then, halfway through the track, the fog dissipates. An Italo-disco pulse bounces in; choral backing vocals flood the space, transforming it into a cathedral, and Redcar lilts up into his falsetto. “In the air/We are converging/In the flesh/We shall ignite,” he promises. “This is a red birdman emergency/This is just how good you appeal to me.” Sometimes the current between two bodies supersedes all possible preoccupations on earth. Sometimes the beat lifts you both up to heaven.
