Why Chris Dropped The 'Tine & The Queens' For Her Latest Album

Following on from the catchy-as-hell single Tilted and debut record Chaleur Humain (released in France in 2014 and here in 2016 as Christine and The Queens), new record Chris already brings crackers Doesn't Matter (or Voleur de Soleil) and Girlfriend (or Damn, Dis-Moi). Whether you're listening in English or French, the appeal of each track is hard to deny - tracks produced with freshness and colour and supported by bold stylised film clips. "I have no preference actually," she says of the process of making music in both French and English. "French is my native language so I like the musicality of it, and English, I do love the powerfulness and the 'pop-bouncy-ness' of it, so it's hard to choose."

An important part of Chris' appeal is her performance style - bold but understated, and with a charisma that we seldom see these days. "Every time I'm writing an album, every song come infused with a video, and so each song comes with that theatricality for me. I can't separate a song from the performance and sometimes the performance helps me finish the song or work on the production. I'd say that the music is at the core of my work but the performance aspect of it takes the lead really quickly after that," she explains. "I can easily get obsessed about what I want to do on the stage and on the TV. And it's really hard to do good TV actually, because it's difficult as a format. I'm always trying to bring some warmth and presence and even some awkwardness even, to just move away from having it be too glossy and dull. I think that TV can be a bit like anaesthesia; you can just be dull to it, so if you can create a silence or an accident or sense of hesitation on TV, then it's also really cool."

At the moment those musical performances are drawing attention as much as Chris' sounds - with spots on international big name talk and performance shows like Later... with Jools Holland, The Tonight Show and The Graham Norton Show. When asked about preparing and staging such pieces she gets into the medium, but also its former king. "I always think of the television moment as a theatrical moment. I'm sorry, I'm going to talk about him, I've been refraining for an hour," she says with self-deprecating fandom but also reverence, "but when you think about a Michael Jackson performance there is a sense of resonance between the video clip and the [television] performance. And also, when I prepare for television I think some people don't know me at all so I have three minutes to try and introduce them to what I'm about and what the song is about."

For those of us captivated by Chris on screen as well as on the speakers, there's a good comparison to be made between Jackson and Chris' bold attack. A recent cover spot on the New York Times featuring her "Girlfriend" film clip also confirmed her impact with the medium, noting not only a strong visual style, but also striking attack at genre and gender. Releasing music previously as Christine and The Queens, now the artist prefers simply Chris as her stage personae. The change of name (another honing in of a character separate to her birth name) is a deliberate statement and play with the audience and identity. "With Christine, the first iteration of my stage character, there were already questionings about gender, very much so. There's a song on the first album [where] I'm singing about having a penis for like four minutes. And it was fun because people didn't ask me how I wanted to be gendered then ... But now with 'Chris' and my shorter hair, people are immediately assuming that I want to be gendered masculine. So it's interesting to me because the visible is so much more of a language than what you're saying, and of course I'm being really candid because I'm in the pop territory and I should know better, but it's interesting that I'm just discovering now [that how I look is more impactful than what I say]" she laughs.

The different rules for men and women are explored on Chris' new self-titled album in many ways, and it's a play she in deliberately. "Chris is very much a strong woman, and the femininity is in that record is not really classic. It's really side by side with macho culture, with wet hair, an open shirt, and actually, if you think about the macho culture and macho way of exposing your body is really feminine also. So by doing that I'm going back full circle to my own body way more. And this is why it's so interesting to me, I'm just staging the hypocrisy of the social construction of gender norms, I'm kind of showing the theatrics, it's working on me as a woman."

Chris could easily give a lecture on identity politics and leave it there, but instead, her approach is to stay firmly in a self-proclaimed 'pop' world. It's an even more interesting juxtaposition given pop is the genre where style and substance are often seen as mortal enemies. "Yeah, I think in pop territory there is a possibility to over-perform gender to the point where it becomes absurd. When I think about Madonna I think about the conic breasts, that were almost phallic, there were so pointy and big they were almost phallic, so it was like 'Oh, ok, You just made breasts phallic!"," she says. "And there is a certain empowerment that comes out of this because to me the pop star is always exploring, and hopefully it's not just freedom that should be just in that entertainment category, it should be available elsewhere. I think if you can be the start of a conversation of a table somewhere, then it's great."