J'adore Le Monde

Arriving late to The Limiñanas.

This past Sunday, after waking before 5am (jetlag from Nepal never ends!), joining a running group for a 7:30a.m. fast and hilly 11-miler, fine-tuning and uploading my Sunday long-read post on How turning off the news has made me better informed, and trying to get some complex gift wrapping taken care of, it’s hardly surprising I wanted a quick nap before heading out to see the Rock Academy showband’s annual free Christmas concert at an Episcopalian church in my hometown of Kingston, New York. (And a party after that! You’re right, I don’t stop.)

I had been giftwrapping to the sound of The Bugle with Frank Moloney, an expat Brit living in New Jersey, and just one of the many excellent DJs on The Face Radio, which regular readers will know is my go-to online station. Frank’s show broadcasts on Mondays, when I’m hard at work, which is where the Face Radio’s well-maintained archives come into play: there’s always at least one newly uploaded show I’m keen to hear if I’m not necessarily in the mood for the one currently on air.

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While much on the Face Radio has a danceable groove to it, Mondays lean indie, and Frankie’s show all the more so; a “90s kid,” as he put it himself on The Bugle’s Best of 2025, he named Oasis as his Band of the Year, and the personal Top 10 Albums list he was working his way through included Pulp and Rialto. (The Pulp album More is indeed excellent, but if we are playing this game of “Great British Bands of the 90s Coming Back Exceptionally Strong in 2025,” my vote would be for Suede and their Antidepressants, which has an exuberance and self-confidence that I would compare to, say, the Charlatans’ self-titled fourth album from 95, i.e. so much earlier in a career. But, as ever, I digress.)

It was during the second hour of the show, knowing I had 15 minutes to spare at most, that I laid down on the bed to rest, and sure enough, felt myself quickly drifting into the land of nod… Until a driving rhythm looped into my dreamstate, all tom toms and incessant tribal repetition, with a minor-key synth line soon coming in before ratcheting up a notch as a vocal came in, the whole thing first accompanying but then waking me thoroughly from the potential nap.

Lionel and Marie Limiñana.

This was one hell of a hard-rocking groove, that kind of scuzzy, relentless force of musical nature arguably blueprinted by The Velvet Underground, perfected (especially in their live shows) by Echo & The Bunnymen, and present in any number of 21^st Century bands who know a good thing when they create it, from The Dandy Warhols to A Place To Bury Strangers to… to The Limiñanas – because that’s who I was listening to, once I let the song play out, got up, and rewound the show to rehear the introduction.

The song in question is called “J’adore le monde” – or, “I love the world,” with vocals by Bertrand Belin - and while it may have had such a dramatic initial impact on me because of the way that its hypnotic rhythm kicked in and woke me up just as I was dropping off, it sounds no less riveting when fully awake. The official video is below. You may want to give yourself five minutes to listen and watch.

I am constantly amazed at what I have somehow missed in the world of music, because until now, The Limiñanas (who hail from Perpignan in France, despite a Spanish-sounding name) have passed me by. This is all the more confusing and even embarrassing given that the duo of drummer/sometime vocalist Marie Limiñana and bassist, organist, and presumably guitarist Lionel Limiñana – have between them released no less than eight albums since 2021, and countless more since debuting in 2010. (Before that they were in the French garage band Les Bellas.)

I might say that “admittedly, several of these albums are soundtracks,” but that is very much the point: if the duo, Lionel in particular, can’t make music for actual films (actual soundtracks have included the documentary Deep Throat - 1972: The Year Zero of Pornography to The Devil Inside Me and the year-old Tigres Hyenas), they make music for their own imaginary films (2021’s De Pelicula, alongside Laurent Garnier, or the video for “J’adore Le Monde,” as above).

Faded, meanwhile, The Limiñanas’ official band studio album from earlier in 2025, on which “J’adore Le Monde” appears, takes their love of films in a different direction, centered as it is around forgotten movie starlets. It features a stellar line-up of guests that only further highlights my ignorance, including Jon Spencer, who joins the duo’s long-time vocal companion Pascal Comelade on the Suicide-like “Space Baby” and the hard-pumping “Degenerate Star” (which contains more of those relentless tom-tom beats from Marie); Bobby Gillespie being Bobby Gillespie on “Prisoner of Beauty”; a dreamy slowed-down arpeggiated vocally-whispered rendition of “Louie Louie” (sung in French, presumably by Marie given that no guest artist is credited); and the whole double album closes out with a cover of “Où va la chance,” in tribute to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy who passed away last year.

If the bad news is that I have blown my credibility factor by having remained in the dark for so long, the good news is that I now have a vast back catalogue to explore. I have already been working my way backwards in the 48 hours since belatedly being introduced to them by Frankie Moloney, given that the soundtracks are largely instrumental and allow me to listen while I work. Everything I have heard has a true artistic quality to it, regardless of tempo or groove, vocal or not, and it makes me happy to know that there is still so much great music to be discovered out there, so many great artists to be introduced to.

Frankie’s full Top 10 Albums of 2025 indicates that there is plenty else I have not had time to hear in depth this year, including Escape-ism and Insecure Men. (Though in my defence, that’s what comes of making my own music, writing largely in silence, and taking a month out in Nepal without western music.) You can hear him running through one track from each, peppered by conversations with Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker and Zia McCabe of The Dandy Warhols, on Mixcloud or The Face Radio’s website.

Thanks to everyone who shares such love of and for quality music. Here’s to more of it in 2026. And here’s to The Limiñanas for making it.