In April, Phoenix teased a bit of music from their new album in a lingerie commercial directed by Sofia Coppola, the wife of frontman Thomas Mars. Unknown at the time, the song turned out to be “Fior di Latte,” an appropriately gauzy synth-pop slow jam that insists, “We’re meant to get it on.” The title refers to the purest Italian gelato, nothing but sweetened cream, and musically, it’s almost as delicious as it is decadent. When Mars sighs, “Fior di latte/Don’t think about it, trigger me happy,” his private language somehow makes sense.
Gelato was reportedly a central inspiration for Ti Amo, the French quartet’s sixth album overall and their third since breaking out with 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Formed in Versailles in the late-’90s with close ties to their peers in Air and Daft Punk, the beguiling synth-rock act had long bucked conventions about what a band could be in a way that deserved a bigger audience. They finally got it thanks to the inimitable and, with apologies to Coppola, “lost in translation” feeling of festival anthems like “1901” and “Lisztomania.” The eventual follow-up, 2013’s Bankrupt!, was a fine excuse for Phoenix fans to celebrate their newfound Coachella-headliner status. Four years later, Ti Amo feels like a sugary treat that ought to hold us over for another festival season, though it hints at loftier ambitions.
At its heart, Ti Amo is another meticulously constructed 10-song set of glossy soft-pop romance. Whenever Phoenix get around to release what’s sure to be a stellar best-of comp, a few welcoming standouts from Ti Amo will belong on there. Alongside the overt come-ons of “Fior di Latte,” another highlight is the euphoric “J-Boy,” which packs sonic details as tightly as its airy “Just because of you” vocal hook. Mars’ scattered, dystopian lyrical imagery works almost like a backdrop for a sci-fi music video, while the real drama plays out in video-game burbles and exaggerated Auto-Tune-like vocal effects.
Not all songs on Ti Amo are this memorable, but others come close. “Fleur de Lys” flips a Fela Kuti sample for what might be their most Hall and Oates song yet, with its urgent “no rest ’till I get to you” falsetto. The ennui that often underlines Phoenix’s songs resurfaces on the charming “Lovelife,” whose lines of solitude and regret belie its title. The galloping bassline on “Tuttifrutti” is in the same lineage as peak New Order, though the lofty vocals about “trashing motels” are more in keeping with Phoenix’s earlier blue-eyed soul.
Along with pop’s ephemerality, the gelato on Ti Amo also plays into the what the band has called its “fantasized version of Italy,” a loose theme that carries over into the accompanying videos and the set pieces of their tour. Recorded in Paris against a backdrop of terrorism, ethnonationalism, and refugees in crisis, the sunny, upbeat Ti Amo is thus meant as a “safe haven” in dark times, Phoenix have said. Although Phoenix originally stood out in their native France for singing in English, deciphering lyrics has mattered less in the mélange of their music. Their effortless use here of not only English, Italian, and Spanish but also, yes, French, on an album concerned with the pure pleasure of a Roman holiday, scans as a bold defense of all that is modern, humanist, and cosmopolitan, akin to the optimism embodied by the exclamation point of recently elected French president Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement.
Alas, these songs—sculpted from thousands of hours of recordings—are being asked to do too much to sustain a coherent geographical concept. On the churning title track, with its polyglot message of love, the narrator also riffs self-awarely about flipping between Buzzcocks and classic Italian crooners, between “unsophisticated soft rock” and Beethoven; other lyrics like “open up your legs” and “don’t tell me no” complicate matters discomfortingly. “Via Veneto” mentions a sonogram, but without the payoff in figurative meaning to be found on Wolfgang’s “Rome,” where a relationship crumbles like an empire. And the grim reality of the headlines does seep in, not always as cleverly as with the vanishing reefs and “Kamikaze in a hopeless world” of “J-Boy.” “Role Model” refers to riots outside and its central character is a Machiavellian chameleon at a podium, signing autographs and climbing up a hill. The overall effect is similar to one of those vacations so exhausting you need another vacation.
For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable. Another case in point is the finale, “Telefono.” There’s a slyly Strokes-like crunch. Mars is singing in Italian. He’s on the phone to a lover in Hollywood, reminiscing about a trip to Rome. He’s as we found him at the end of Bankrupt!—alone, “solo”—but his location is wildly specific: in a studio, in the Italian beach town of Passoscuro. Like the rest of Ti Amo, it’s impressively rococo, but perhaps easier to admire than to love. Don’t think about it, trigger us happy.
