I’ve known quite a few Swedish artists, notably Le Lac Long 814 and their entourage, indulge in the delights of French culture – it is de rigueur over there – and one other Norwegian artist I can think of – whose new album will be reviewed shortly – is quite capable of introducing French l’art de vivre into her work.
But Bellefolie (Isabell Engelsen and supporting musicians)is something else. And nothing suggests that more than by naming yourself as your debut album’s title, in English, ‘Beautiful Madness’. You could spend a lifetime trying to find something as both erudite and philosophically crazy as it is; the workings of the product of a holy alliance between the weather-beaten Norwegian west coast, the cultural depth of the Left Bank in Paris where she lived for several years, and the existential angst of Camus and Kierkegaard.
Where edginess meets philosophy.
You won’t find that at a Taylor Swift stadium gig. Only edginess.
Bellefolie’s debut album (several tracks of which we have reviewed in more depth as singles) comprises 10 exquisitely crafted songs including ‘Your Gates’ which was listed in NMC’s Top 40 Songs of 2025 and which on reflection should really have been a Top 5 entry.
Indeed many of the songs are wholly or partly sung in French, with some juxtaposition between it and English.
And there is something here that I was not expecting, was unprepared for and which came somewhat out of left field and that is the tenderness of her emotions when confronted with loss.
Opening track ‘Modern Apathy’ is posited as a focus track and asks why, when the world is at stake we feel nothing, preferring to hunker down and bunker up around our humdrum lives and wish it would just go away, a glowing example of collective apathy. But then what could we do about it anyway? Protest too loudly and you’ll probably get shot for your trouble.
To a hip-hop beat Isabell opines,
“If the world is at stake/but you feel nothing/Your veins are getting cold/but that’s how you’re warm”
Hope they’re keeping warm in Kyiv right now. Faites attention, Donald!
I joked in the single review of the aforementioned ‘Your Gates’that it wasn’t about Bill, who is suddenly in the news again for all the wrong reasons. It is about being in the process of losing someone (literally), and how far you are willing to go to reach them, by “cracking open your gates” and “taking on all your pain”, as if exorcising a malign spirit.
So the song appears to be along the lines of Shakespears Sister’s ‘Stay’, itself a very powerful one.
And ‘Your Gates’ is just that, potent, as it switches back and forward between a sultry ballad and a tremendous synth and cello-led cinematic anthem and drips with emotion from beginning to end.
“And I/I will follow you in shades/I will pump blood through your veins/Out of love/Love.”
The following track, ‘In the Clouds’ is a surprisingly jaunty natural successor as it deals with grief. It isn’t directed specifically to any person but one might assume it refers back to the previous track.
The storyline seems to lie along similar lines to Highasakite’s ‘Lover where do you live’, Sol Heilo’s ‘Closer to the Sky’ and Nightwish’s ‘Lanternlight’; all searching for answers to what lies beyond the clouds and how to connect with what is there.
“Where are you?/Where would you go?/Did you call for me/when time set you free?”
And the theme continues further still with ‘Tiny Lullaby’, a touching ode to small children and babies that “left too soon”, and thereby “offering solace to anyone grieving a loved one.”
“But these blue eyes were supposed to see much longer… supposed to see much longer/than mine should ever see”.
It is a tender song, conceived and played at just the right level to hit you in the feels without breaking you into little pieces over someone you never knew.
It does suggest a personal reason for it being written, that perhaps one of the band members has suffered such a loss, or someone they know.
And there is the same clinging hope for some form of reconnection beyond an earthly one of flesh and bone, which is becoming a recurring theme.
“Will I see you again?/A hollow, a hollow of light/I follow, I follow”.
‘La Nuit Blanche’ (‘The Sleepless Night’) is the first of several songs wholly or partly in French and is an adaptation of the Senegalese poet Birago Diop’s work, ‘Souffles’ (in full, ‘Le Souffle des Ancetres’ or the Breath of the Ancestors).
Diop was an exponent of Négritude (Blackness), a framework of critique and literary theory aimed at raising and cultivating “black consciousness” across Africa and its diaspora. The first representative of BLM you might say.
In the short lyrical passage from the poem the insistence is made that “Les morts ne sont pas morts” (the dead are not dead) – they are in the voice of water, fire, grasses and forest and in the home.
That concept, perpetuating the theme of separation and grief again, is so similar in nature to that of the aforementioned ‘Lanternlight’ that the songs should be twinned. And I’m comparing this song favourably with one made by a writer and band with 30 year’s experience and millions of fans. That is quite extraordinary.
A hip-hop theme returns on ‘Grey Area’ which blends that genre with pop, Arabic scales, an unusual time signature and strings, which were recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios.
The song is an entreaty not to continue to strive to be a better version of yourself; rather to be what you are and damn the consequences.
You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the first half of the song, which is in English and is lyrically cryptic, to say the least. The second half is again in French, the other part of the ‘grey area’ I suppose, and starts to make more sense. And it gets more pointed.
In it, Isabell sings of the little war going on within her (“la petite guerre en moi”) which never ends and for which no-one will benefit or win. It won’t stop, but she has to put an end to the madness, beautiful or otherwise. However she feels that, unlike Sia, she will never be found.
One possible interpretation is that ‘la petite guerre on moi” hints at bipolarism, although that would be an extreme take on it.
Musically, the hip hop opening grabs your attention instantly. I was half expecting Coolio to come in on vocals.
The juxtaposition of apathy and existential angst is at the heart of ‘Restless Nights’. They live side by side but are not good bedfellows, the former dominating the latter and too few choose awareness over brain numbness.
The song identifies mental unrest as a loyal friend trying to tell you something essential, and which stands in stark contrast to the too common “modern apathy,” against which the whole album protests loudly.
An ethereal guitar-led ballad with vocals that might have been whispered by Jane Birkin, ‘Restless Nights’ throws down the gauntlet to contemporary lethargy and indifference as she sees herself changing, Red Dragon-like in the eyes of others into what she is becoming, casting off her anxiety like a demon in an exorcism.
“Je me regarde dans tes yeux/et je vois que je suis en train de changer pour le mieux”
‘Out of Flight’ expands on the concept. Having been informed by a significant other that the change is progressing too slowly, she aspires that she and everyone else should get ‘Out of Flight’ which I take to mean to break free of the preordained flight path.
A track that is a little reminiscent of the 1960’s Yé-Yé! style that was popular in France and beyond.
I haven’t got my ahead around penultimate track, the wholly French ‘La Montagne’yet but I’m guessing it introduces a hero, someone that has climbed that allegorical mountain to the summit and thereby cast off the shackles of repression and lethargy and embraced the summit.
“And who carried the mountain?/The mountain!/It was you! It was you!/You deserved the world/All of it, all of it.”
Musically, it is triumphant, dominated by major keys and with sweeping strings elevating the subject back up the ski slope in the expectation they won’t come back down again.
The album wraps up with ‘It’s time’, purportedly to travel to a nirvana where she can live freely une vie intègre, devoid of the falsehoods of her current existence.
“Hey now take me to/consciousness/where I’m free like you/Of all is what we’re made
You can see through/all I do/How can I defend/how much I bend/to live/this lie.”
This is one of the most difficult albums I’ve ever had to interpret and my assumptions might be anywhere from hitting the bullseye to the dart falling on the floor.
Isabell doesn’t make it easy but then again neither did Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre and this piece of work justifies comparison with theirs as it explores by observation alienation and estrangement, anxiety and grief. Much of the content, both musical and lyrical, is erudite, very deep and often unexpected, embracing varied musical styles and unanticipated time signatures and complemented by Piaf-like vocalisations.
It is a highly ambitious piece too, the more so for being a debut album, addressing the full gamut of human existence in 2025 when it was written, at la fin du premier quart du siècle, from her perspective.
In the main, two themes come across; the absurdity of life and, separately, its corollary, loss. It may be that the album is remembered more for its response to loss rather than for the philosophical arguments on existence.
The loss part took me by surprise, running through several early tracks, but should not have done. The first dozen pages of Camus’ L’Étranger for example range over a protracted funeral for the mother of the novel’s hero/anti-hero Meursault, and whose death is announced in the very first line. He’d rather not be there and hardly shies away from that position. After all, he has a life to live and his girlfriend is waiting for him.
Isabell Engelsen’s own reaction to loss is much, much more benign. She would have been forefront at that funeral. And which just goes to show there is more than one way to skin an existentialist.
Indeed, at times she is actually like a character in an existentialist novel, striving to come to terms with the world’s absurdity but ironically taking up cudgels to combat it in a positive way, unlike some of those characters.
Ultimately she comes across as the complete package; musically, lyrically and ideologically.
‘Beautiful Madness’ will not be to everyone’s taste, especially those that look no further than a boy or girl band for their entertainment. But for anyone who strives for answers to existence and purpose they will find as much to dwell on here as they would in any novel or philosophical treatise.
NMC score: 9/10
(Continues after the Spotify link)
Find her/them on:
Website: https://bellefoliemusic.com/bellefolie
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554815578790
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bellefoliemusic/
