Paris (AFP)

The MNNQNS quartet removed the vowels - pronounced "Mannequins" in English - but kept the essentials, between pop sensitivity and rock energy, to seduce a label in England, a fine calling card for a French group.

As the crow flies, only 176 km separate Rouen, where the formation comes from, from Brighton, a seaside town to the south of London, base of "FatCat Records", these "Big Cat Disks" which have put their feet on MNNQNS and previously on sizes like Animal Collective or Sigur Rós.

But crossing the Channel is a whole world for the guitar gangs in France. "In France, groups like us, we discover them a little later, after the trainings which come from England or the United States. If thanks to the English label we can shorten this gap, it's cool", comments Grégoire Mainot, drummer of MNNQNS, met by AFP alongside his three stooges before a radio session.

Grégoire, thirty, is the oldest of a band - the shy bass player Félix Ramaën is ten years younger - already well established on the scene, with three Rock en Seine festivals to his credit, in particular. On March 6, they will be one of the headliners of the Inrocks festival (March 5-7 at La Gaîté Lyrique), eagerly awaited with the post-punk of "Body negative", their first album, in English, released in late 2019. .

- "Hard to resist them" -

"Since the beginning of the year, we've been making a new set, with progress towards a time when + it's going to blow a cable +, where we make all of our most aggressive songs in a single block", announces Grégoire, sitting in a Parisian brasserie opposite Marc Lebreuilly, reserved guitarist. "Something close to trance yes", adds Adrian D'Epinay, guitarist and singer, familiar with this kind of repetitive loops with what he listens to, between "industrial" music and free jazz.

"I had seen them on stage during their release party (album release party), it's very hard to resist them, they transmit great energy", develops with AFP Carole Boinet, deputy editor-in-chief Inrocks and co-programmer of the festival. "The MNNQNS bring to the French rock landscape something new, an Anglo-Saxon, American sound, very well done but without making a pale copy, it's quite current, quite modern".

It was Adrian who found the name of the group. "It is not in the model sense, but in the sense of the plastic support, which corresponds to a somewhat cold, post-punk 1980s aesthetic. For online survival, to find ourselves on the internet, we removed the vowels. Well, today people can't write the name ... (laughs) "

- "Aligned stars" -

MNNQNS know they have a card to play at the moment. The locomotive The Strokes - US group at the origin of the return of the guitars at the beginning of the years 2000 - starts again to spit smoke. After an intoxicating Olympia in Paris on Tuesday, New Yorkers will release a new album on April 10. And above all, on both sides of the Channel, rock bands are bubbling.

"It's like a fashion dress, rock is going to come back", predicted for AFP Julien Hohl, director of the label Deaf Rock and manager of the group Last Train. "In theaters, it is always full. And the fact that the MNNQNS were spotted at the start by an English label, that means something."

"The stars are a little aligned, things have been going on for a while, you'd have to be blind not to see it," agrees Adrian, a former musicology student in Cardiff. And Grégoire adds: "We film in England in May, a week". Logical sequence.

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