Bolidde’s new album, Rainbow Galaxy, doesn’t so much arrive as it does seep into the room, a ten-track document of flight powered by rock and roll muscle. Here is a veteran of the French scene who understands the architecture of a great pop hook, but who uses that knowledge not to build a summer villa, but a high-speed getaway vehicle. The album’s energy is immense, a slick fusion of snarling vintage riffs and modern, polished propulsion, all designed for one purpose: to go somewhere, anywhere, but here.
The sound makes me think of those old, ornate amusement park rides—the ones with glorious, peeling paint and a surprisingly violent motor. There’s a beautiful, melodic surface promising a fantastical journey, but beneath it churns a raw, mechanical disillusionment with the present. Bolidde maps out a constellation of escapes: retreating into the memory of a first love, finding solace in the transient magic of a traveling carnival, or simply railing against the calculated deceptions of the powerful. It’s a restlessness born from a world that feels increasingly toxic and rigged.
Across these songs, the longing for a past “golden age” collides with a desperate protest against a crooked now. Stories of entrapment, both by manipulative people and the ghosts of circumstance, feel less like simple narratives and more like field notes from a psychic jailbreak. The album poses no easy answers, offering sanctuary but always with the hum of the engine still running in the background.
It leaves you wondering not if escape is possible, but what the chase itself does to a person. After the final chord fades, are you any freer, or just more adept at running?
