Angèle Wrote Love Triangle on a Scrap of Paper Under a Dinner Table
The song started under a table. At a dinner in Brussels, Angèle overheard friends debating the particulars of a love triangle, and she wrote the phrase down on a little piece of paper beneath the table, she said in a statement carried by The Line of Best Fit. Now “Love Triangle” is out, with Caroline Polachek singing and SebastiAn behind the beat.
The single premiered on BBC Radio 1 on 29 September, Pitchfork reported, and it is the final preview of Angèle’s third album, Instinct, due on 16 October.
A Dinner-Table Idea That Became a Three-Voice Song
Angèle has explained the song’s origin in detail. “Some friends were debating the particularities of a love triangle, and I remember being completely captivated by their stories,” she said. The track, she added, “plays with the boundary between reality and fantasy. You never completely know whether what is happening is actually being lived or simply imagined.”
She framed the collaboration itself as part of the concept. SebastiAn’s presence, she said, lets the desire in the song become almost instinctive, moving forward like an obsession, while Polachek’s voice, “both airy and powerful”, brings something almost supernatural to it. “The triangle exists musically too: three worlds, three voices, three sensibilities coming together,” she said.
What SebastiAn Brought to the Beat
SebastiAn produced “Love Triangle”, with Angèle and her longtime collaborator Tristan Salvati co-producing, according to The Line of Best Fit. Pitchfork described the track as a killer electro beat from the Ed Banger-affiliated producer, and The Line of Best Fit heard pulsing electronic textures under the vocals.
The pairing brings in a producer known for working through other people’s voices. SebastiAn’s stature was built less on his solo records, such as his 2011 debut Total and Thirst, than on production work for Frank Ocean, M.I.A. and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Loud And Quiet wrote in its review of the second album. The review praised his knack for reframing his energy through each collaborator, noting that ten of its fourteen tracks carried a featured performer, and described his “highly instinctive hedonistic arrangements”.
Stereogum compared SebastiAn’s sleazy, zippy beat to the Blackout era of Britney Spears and said the song oozes hedonistic energy. That club-leaning approach fits an album that also features Justice and Soulwax, two more names from the same electronic scene.
Two Languages, Mostly Whispered
The vocals split along language lines. Angèle sings in English while Polachek sings in both French and English, The Line of Best Fit reported. Pitchfork put it more playfully: Polachek woos the Belgian star in her native French, and readers were invited to choose their fighter between SebastiAn and Polachek.
Polachek described the vocal approach as “slithering around these bilingual whispered verses, almost without singing at all”. NYLON, admitting that much of the French went over its head, caught one English line that sums the song up: “Nothing freaks me out like a love triangle.”
The Brussels Jazz Bar They Both Played as Teenagers
The collaboration came with a coincidence. “While recording ‘Love Triangle’ in a house in Hollywood, Angèle and I discovered that as teenagers we’d both performed at the same jazz bar in Brussels, L’Archiduc,” Polachek said. “Somehow it makes total sense that we’re meeting here on the other side now, the hard sexy electro side.”
The Line of Best Fit reports that the track was recorded in Brussels, while Polachek remembers sessions in that Hollywood house, so the song appears to have been made across both cities. Either way, it connects two careers that, by Polachek’s account, both passed through the same Brussels venue when the singers were teenagers.
Where Love Triangle Sits on Instinct
“Love Triangle” is the 12th song on the 13-track album, placed between “Je sais” and the closing “NYC Blues”, Dork reported. Polachek and SebastiAn were confirmed as featured artists when Angèle announced the record in late August, but this is the first chance to hear the collaboration.
The full running order, as published by NME, is:
- “Instinct” (intro)
- “Dis-le”
- “Au revoir”
- “Une seule vie”
- “Trop” (featuring Soulwax)
- “On verra”
- “What You Want” (featuring Justice)
- “Je compte”
- “F4ck 4ever”
- “Tout décider”
- “Je sais”
- “Love Triangle” (featuring Caroline Polachek and SebastiAn)
- “NYC Blues”
It follows three earlier releases from the album: “Une seule vie”, “Dis-le” and “What You Want”, her collaboration with Justice, which came out earlier this year according to Stereogum. Angèle produced the record with Salvati, and the guest list also includes Soulwax on “Trop”. Dork noted that the album has been billed as a return to instinct, “to the part of yourself that exists before expectation, performance and external noise”. It is her first album since Nonante-Cinq, according to Pitchfork. It is released via Sony Music.
The announcement statement set out the themes. Across the album, it said, Angèle “explores the tension between control and release, image and reality, and the different versions of ourselves that emerge when we stop trying to fit into a fixed identity”. It described the record as “electronic at its core”, using chrome as a recurring visual and conceptual language, NME reported. Stereogum noted that she self-produced it with Salvati.
How the Instinct Campaign Has Been Built
The rollout has leaned on handmade visuals. “Dis-le” arrived in June, and the album announcement came with “Une seule vie”, which the statement described as an “urgent call”: a first-person stream of thought in which Angèle lays out her doubts and questions her relationship to the world, to truth and to illusion, until “what remains is the desire itself, to live”. Its video, written and directed by Thomas Mailaender and produced by Partizan, was shot on 16mm in the south of France, with stop motion, mirrors, printed images and superimpositions all created in camera and footage of the 12 August solar eclipse worked into the film, according to NME and Dork. Mailaender said the team imagined the video as “a succession of memories, visions and mental images that physically burst into Angèle’s reality”, with analogue film as “a fragile, imperfect material to talk about memory, nostalgia and time slipping away from us”. The statement added that the making of the video is left visible in the frame rather than generated afterwards. “What You Want” has already been remixed by the New York duo Fcukers.
Dork also listed a London Roundhouse date for Angèle next May. Live plans are taking different shapes across alt-pop right now; Mitski, for one, traded a proper tour for residencies this year.
Caroline Polachek’s Run of Collaborations
For Angèle, the themes of image and identity are not new. Speaking to NME in 2022 about her song “Balance ton quoi”, she said that for women in music the conversation is “always about how you are and never about what you do”, and that women sometimes have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. Of performing that song live, she said: “I know that people will sing it with me very loud.”
For Polachek, “Love Triangle” extends a busy stretch of features. Her latest solo album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, came out in 2023, followed by a deluxe Everasking Edition in 2024, and she has since released one-off singles including collaborations with Danny L Harle and the English band caroline, Pitchfork noted.
For Angèle, the song is the last look at Instinct before release day. Whether the triangle is lived or imagined, as she put it, is left for the listener to decide on 16 October.
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