Angèle has teamed up with Caroline Polachek and SebastiAn for a new single called ‘Love Triangle’. The club-ready track is lifted from the Belgian singer’s third album, Instinct, which arrives on October 12. It follows previous cuts ‘Dis-le’ and ‘Une seule vie’. Check it out below.
In a press release, Angèle said:
This song first came from a conversation I overheard at a dinner in Brussels. Some friends were debating the particularities of a love triangle, and I remember being completely captivated by their stories. I wrote ‘Love Triangle’ down on a little piece of paper under the table.
I later met SebastiAn in the studio in Paris and we listened to some demos together. As soon as I heard the first notes of this completely crazy arpeggio, I remember thinking that this was exactly the direction I wanted to take. Within a few hours of working with SebastiAn and Tristan, the first version of ‘Love Triangle’ started to emerge — that wild arpeggio, club sounds and an almost anthemic chorus.
The words ‘Love Triangle’ came back to me, and this production felt like the perfect space to explore desire, choice, projection and fear. Inviting Caroline Polachek onto the track felt obvious. I had crossed paths with her several times and I’ve been a huge fan of her work, going back to her Chairlift days. I wanted to give another woman a voice in response to the first part of the story.
When she arrived at the makeshift studio we had set up in a house, I was once again struck by her presence and her beauty. Hearing her sing that melody moved me immediately. We had fun telling the story from her point of view and writing what came next. That’s when the song really made sense. ‘All I ever wanted was both of you’ eventually meets ‘Nothing scares me more than a love triangle’. We were interested in that contradiction: wanting to experience everything, feel everything, keep everything, while knowing that love sometimes means letting go.
The song plays with the boundary between reality and fantasy. You never completely know whether what is happening is actually being lived or simply imagined. SebastiAn’s presence allows the desire to become almost instinctive, something that moves forward like an obsession. And Caroline’s voice, both airy and powerful, brings something almost supernatural to the music. The triangle exists musically too: three worlds, three voices, three sensibilities coming together.
I love that ‘Love Triangle’ is sexy, pop and slightly funny on the surface, while underneath it deals with something much more universal: attachment, losing control and the fear of ending up heartbroken. But my heart is at its happiest — I couldn’t have dreamed of a better collaboration.
Polachek added: “While recording ‘Love Triangle’ in a house in Hollywood, Angèle and I discovered that as teenagers we’d both performed at the same jazz bar in Brussels, L’Archiduc. Somehow it makes total sense that we’re meeting here on the other side now, the hard sexy electro side, where we’re slithering around these bilingual whispered verses, almost without singing at all…”
