Composing Eros was complicated. Six tracks, designed to lock into each other. Three co-produced with David Benzazon, one of them co-written with him.

It happened during a difficult period. I was spending a lot of time anxious, eyes glued to the news. In a state of shock, you could say.

For me, Eros started from a simple idea. War — the penetration of a territory by an army, of flesh by metal, of minds by propaganda. It needs our basest instincts to exist. Our fears to earn our approval. Our instincts for revenge to satisfy us.

"Break Me, Erase Me, Make Me a Part of You / Upload me Inside You"

That's roughly it. The desire to flee all of it into the flesh of another, to lose one's identity, to dissolve in a final upload.

WOUND_2 is a track I have too much affection for. It's imperfect and raw at the same time — it genuinely does something to me. I invited David to a studio session for it. I already had a demo, some vocal takes, some new lyrics scribbled in French. Result: we nodded our heads a lot, and in the end the track had little to do with that demo. It was monstrous. We both had it in our heads for a while.

So I kept working on the lyrics. I wanted French vocals for the first time — I wanted precision on meaning, even at the expense of musicality. In the end, I think it works.

Love is deceptively simple, but it took a long time to figure out. I wanted to combine something psychedelic and hypnotic — to symbolise the pro-violence propaganda appearing everywhere — with the heavy, "badass" brutality that war evokes in me. I grew up with Rambo, like a lot of us. That virile imaginary the track mimics and scratches at — it's mine. It's all of ours. The machine gun makes me think of that. And of Metal Slug, which I played a lot on arcade machines.

It's obviously first and foremost a sketch on love and war — as classic as it gets — but for me it speaks to other things too. I also wanted, perhaps clumsily, to touch on romantic relationships in the era of Stories and appearances. The era where you might be tempted to believe you're in love simply because someone made you feel more beautiful, more powerful. The war metaphor, the relationship to religion — what is it doing everywhere bullets fly, that thing?

I wanted to connect Eros — mythological, Freudian, artistic, carnal — to the inhuman horror of bombardments, chemical weapons, the reification of the other that I had in front of my eyes. And I wanted a sound that expressed that idea. On Kāma, for instance, while paying tribute to Nine Inch Nails in my own way, I tried to make those sensations coexist. The warmth of the voice against the metallic weight of industrial drums — drum machine in the style of DFAM, recorded straight to tape.

It's funny, because Tetsuo: The Iron Man imposed itself naturally. I remember seeing it for the first time — I was looking online for films worth watching, I was consuming a fair amount of horror at the time. I didn't fully understand it. Then I came across it again in 2024, scrolling mindlessly. I added it to my list, and while composing Eros, I watched it again. It felt a little mystical. Like a sign.

What better way to close this story than a metamorphosis? After being ground up by the cylinders of machines, isn't it logical that the man himself becomes one? Evolve or die, as they say.

The Outro is, for me, an open ending. It functions more as an introduction to what follows, where Tetsuo concluded the argument. I like its symmetry with the EP's introduction. I want to find a place for those loops live. More on that later.