Today, the Belgian pop phenomenon Angèle returns with her new, electrifying single, aptly titled “What You Want” crafted alongside the French electronic powerhouse duo Justice. “What You Want” is out now on Angèle VL Records / Because Music, and hits with the kind of force and clarity that only supreme pop achieves. The song arrives alongside a video, created with (LA)HORDE (Madonna, Sam Smith, Christine and the Queens), the visionary trio behind the Ballet National de Marseille.
The track feels like a pivot in Angèle’s catalog: a hinge moment that arrives in the glow of her 2024 Paris Olympics performance, where she joined Phoenix and Kavinsky for an electric take on “Nightcall” that stole the show and broke Shazam records. After all the billions of streams, the Dua Lipa collaboration “Fever”, her Netflix documentary titled Angèle, CHANEL high-fashion campaigns, NYC Fashion Week with A$AP Rocky, and her first U.S. tour - including Coachella - this song feels like a continuation of Angèle’s big global moment, this time sharpened and unpolished.
Angèle reflects: “I went to say hi in their dressing room after their show, which I’d loved. It was the first time we met, and we talked a lot about our careers and our creative visions. I spontaneously suggested they come to the studio. We spent an afternoon listening to the demos I’d been working on on my computer. I had this track, ‘What You Want,’ a slightly sultry, sensual, offbeat song I’d written. But since I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, I’d put it aside. I thought Justice could bring the electro-club expertise — and the tension — that were missing from that first version. After we met, I sent them the demo, and they came back with this version that I found absolutely brilliant. They understood everything! They brought a power to the track that the intention and balance had been missing. Bringing our worlds together without losing our identities — that’s the greatest success of this song!”
Justice’s Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé share: “Spending a bit of time with Angèle confirmed the intuition we had about her: she’s an excellent musician and producer. Making ‘What You Want’ with her felt as easy as it was natural. Although her music is different from ours, the track called for something sensual and brutal that we instinctively connected with, without compromise.”
(LA)HORDE adds: “We wondered how, after the Olympic buzz around her collaboration with Phoenix and Kavinsky, a woman of her generation could make the codes of the French Touch her own — a powerful artistic movement, but also a very male-dominated one. We found it incredibly exciting to support this meeting between the fathers of electro and Angèle’s own universe.”
“What You Want” unites Angèle with Justice, the French electronic titans whose ebullient synths helped define the global sound of 2000s dance music. Angèle’s featherlight, intimate pop instincts meet Justice’s industrial swagger and rock-damaged grandeur. The result: electronic music that feels muscular without being macho, and pop that feels as emotionally precise as it does dangerous.
The collaboration began in December 2024, when Angèle attended a Justice show in Brussels with her mother. She met them backstage, invited them to her studio, and played them a song she loved but hadn’t fully unlocked. She told them, “Do what you want with it.” They transformed it into “What You Want.” Justice delivered the scale and tension, Angèle delivered the presence and sheer magnetism. Together, they made a track that feels global and entirely of the gritty, unglossed moment. She sings in English and French, moving between private feeling and collective release: “What you want / I’m only / What you want / c’est pour la vie,” she purrs. Shot in the middle of the night on an iPhone 17 Pro, in the backstreets of Marseille — between a laundromat, the street, and a bar — the video extends this story of love and female empowerment in a highly cinematic way. It also invites dancer Nora Monsecour into a breathless chase driven by desire, with Angèle embodying the figure who breaks taboos and prejudices along the way. The iPhone 17 Pro becomes a narrative tool in its own right, serving the choreographic work imagined by (LA)HORDE, staying close to bodies and faces, following movements with fluidity while capturing the density of the night. Angèle appears, as always, commanding and magnetic; a pop girlie moving through the nighttime scene with grit and grace. “What You Want” stands as a bold new declaration. It captures a pop star in ascension, an artist aligned with her desires, and with a sound that feels in lockstep with the times. Angèle isn’t coming. She’s already here.
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