Paris surf-pop band, La Femme, are soon to release a four-track EP (December 13 on 3rd Side Records) featuring the commanding single below, Sur La Planche.

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Since their US debut in 1999, Tahiti 80 has released four albums and nine EPs. Their newest album, The Past, The Present & The Possible, is to be released on February 22 on the band’s own Human Sounds label. Check out this awesome John Talabot remix of the song Darlin’.

Created by Melbourne-based artist Marisa Lai, this claymation video for the single, A Greased and Golden Palm, by French pop singer Orouni, is simply stunning. [Read more about Australian art, design, and music at The Colour: Aussie culture in pictures]

Paris-based Shaka Ponk’s sound blends electro, rock, punk, and dance with a stunning live show that combines advanced digital animation and an unsurpassed display of energy from the band members.

We’re big fans of French duo Cocoon, so we spoke to frontman Marc Daumail to prove it. Ahead of their upcoming tour of Australia in November, we asked him how vibrant the French music scene is right now: ‘It’s such a relief to be considered like a real band singing in English in a country like France, which is very conservative about its music traditions. We know Moriarty and The Do. They are nice. We all worked a lot to make this scene exist’. Which folk acts have most excited you recently? ‘My albums of the year are not very folky: Grizzly Bear, Lee Fields, The XX. But The Tallest Man On Earth just made one of the best folk albums of all time’. Read Cocoon’s Secret Playlist.

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French duo, The Do, stormed into our iPods with their brilliant album, A Mouthful. We checked in with them to find out the music that inspired their album and they started by propping the Radiohead track, I Will [listen below]: ‘This is sort of a religious track. Someday it could be sung in churches Radiohead is full of grace!’ Read the rest of The Do’s Secret Playlist.

We checked in with Mark Daumail from French duo Cocoon to find out what music he’s been getting down to lately: ‘Emily Jane White’s song the Demon [listen below] is beautiful. She must have listened to Cat Power and Fiona Apple too much, but it made her write better songs than them!’ Read the rest of Mark Daumail’s Secret Playlist.

We posted French duo The Do a few weeks back, describing as that hipster band you always wanted to form, but never got around to it. Well, having seen the clip for the single, On My Shoulders, I think I’ll have a crack at it. Tomorrow. Or perhaps some time next week.

French duo Trop Tard make straight-faced, Suicide-esque, synth-and-guitar electro tunes that sound like dark rituals performed in the catacombs beneath the streets of Paris. Repetitive, bleak, and cold, this is dance music for the shambling undead.

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We featured Nouvelle Vague frontman, Marc Collin’s Secret Playlist recently, so we thought it would be a good time to check in with him on the eve of the band’s Unplugged Australian tour, which will see them play shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in mid-December. As a child of the 80s, I love your covers from that era. Is there a song that you wouldn’t cover? ‘No, I think that every song can be reinvented. It’s only a matter of having the right idea for arrangements, vocalist, production, and so on’. How did you manage you make the Yazoo song Don’t Go sound so damn sultry? ‘It was fun! I asked Gerald Toto to play the chords and sing the melody,thinking of how Jose Feliciano could have done it in the late 60s, and it happened. It is a magical moment when your ideas suddenly become real’. Do you find audiences singing along loudly to the music you play now wherever you perform? ‘It’s always good when the audience is singing. It brings us energy and shows us that they know the albums. Also, we can see which songs are the favourites’.

You know that band you’ve always wanted to form, the one with the little-girl-lost singer with the mischevious eyes and the propulsive beats that drive bass hooks so catchy you want to bottle them up and sell them to Sting? That’s right, that fictional band that lingers just that little deeper in your imagination every time you saunter down Bedford Avenue, surrounded by girls in neon tights and guys in ruffed up converse. You know the one? Well, guess what, you’re too late. It’s arrived. It’s French. And it’s so damn good.

Like any fan of a genre, I can’t stand bands that water down the basic elements of said genre in order to make it more accessible to the masses. I used to consider Gojira one of these bands, but it may be because I couldn’t get past their lame album covers. To be honest, they’re still a little too influenced by hardcore on their new album, but I have to admit, the debut video from The Way of All Flesh is brutal as hell. As a matter of fact, the tracks that the French four-piece is streaming on its MySpace page are pretty freaking incredible — unapologetically death metal, but with a few left-field elements, and again, some hardcore-isms with the vocals I could do without. I have to stop being so prejudiced.

Monarch are an incredibly grim, lumbering doom metal band from Basque country in France. Frontwoman Emilie Bresson is one of those rare female singers in metal that’s at once fierce and raspy, yet identifiably female, creating a haunting, menacing sound that can stand up against the most ragingly macho bands out there.

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We interviewed Marc Collin, the creative force behind French group Nouvelle Vague, who along with a series of 80s acoustic tribute albums also released an installment in the popular Late Night Tales compilation series.
What was the most underrated of the 1980s New Wave bands and which was the worst successful band of that era?
‘Difficult to say … the sound for example should have been much bigger but also some bands like Section 25 (I got a live recording from 1984 and it’s acid house!) missed the success. I’m thinking also of Mecano, an incredible Dutch band. As for the worst, well what happened to Simple Minds, Human League, and The Cure after 1985?’

How many albums did you listen to in order to put together your tracklisting for Late Night Tales?
‘I didn’t listen to the tracks I selected. I put my selection together only by memory! I like to work only in a theoretical way. It was only when I was supposed to do the running order that I listened again to the tracks. And ultimately they didn’t keep my running order!’

If the mix could be summed up with one track off the compilation, which one would it be?‘Maybe Cibelle by Phoenix because there’s a lot of influences in this track – from experimental, to bossa, pop, jazz and so on’.