Photos: Daniel Pickard Announces Debut Album BEHAVIOUR, Shares HEARTBEATS THE FLAW
The new single traces the highs and lows of romance over a French-touch groove, Pickard says.
Indie pop artist Daniel Pickard has announced his debut album, Behaviour, which will be released independently on October 23 via AWAL. The announcement comes alongside a new single, 'Heartbeats the Flaw,' which traces 'the euphoric highs and catastrophic lows of romance' to what the release describes as a nonchalant, French-touch groove. The single is accompanied by a visualizer.
Photo Credit: Axel Gillot | Download hi-res image
''Heartbeats the Flaw' is a song about loyalty and the lack of assurance of it,' Pickard says. 'It's the romantic swooping of highs and lows, set in a seductively frantic room, a disco of playful gestures and anxiety. Inspired by French Touch with its sensibility and funky groove, it's a nonchalantly sensual mood that is painted with emotional discourse and conflict.'
Directed by Axel Gillot, the 'Heartbeats the Flaw' visualizer refracts the course of a romance into the image of a beloved houseplant. Set in a winter garden, the video is described as an exercise in character studies, with Pickard assuming the voice and dress of a lovestruck man with no name. 'I play quite a disreputable character,' he says, 'naively meandering at caring for a loved one. The plant is actually fuming with its companion by exhales of disgust in the form of dust.'
'I like to pose questions that people don't want to think about or answer,' says Daniel Pickard. 'Not forcing an answer. Just playing around with it.' That inclination toward discomfiture, pushing and prodding at polite society, runs through his debut album, Behaviour. Sarcasm and self-deprecation hold sway on songs set in nineteenth-century gay brothels ('First Past the Pose'), swish hotel room afterparties ('Room Service'), New York basement bars, São Paolo's Guarulhos airport ('São Paulo'), and offices decked out in naff IKEA furniture ('MD is a Pervert') — articulated via French pop, Italo disco, Serge Gainsbourg lyricism, and contributions from composer and violinist Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Pet Shop Boys) and composer Michael Stein (Stranger Things).
The Coventry-raised, London-based singer, songwriter, and musician — formerly of art-pop band Half Loon — has always been fascinated by social behaviors: the way people of all walks of life interact, the oddities of their movements. On his debut album, there are songs about youthful naivety, about lacking the gumption to say how you feel. There's even a love song: 'Love On A Lie,' originally written back in 2011 when Pickard was strung out in Sardinia after the breakdown of his first big romance. Though, 'When I wrote this album, I wasn't in love,' he clarifies. 'I was able to get pretty playful with it.'
Pickard doesn't come from an overtly musical household but he grew up an avid listener, beginning with the Motown tapes his mother would play in her Ford Orion, which regularly broke down on the school run. Later, Eminem, Dr Dre, and Britpop gave way to classic acts (The Beatles, The Kinks, The Stones, Pink Floyd) and British psych and synth groups. He admired the androgynous, even effeminate side of Suede and The Smiths, and the latter's song 'The Headmaster Ritual,' a takedown of British schools, spoke to his own experiences growing up in Coventry, a place he describes as his 'STI: soul, trauma, and incandescence. We don't escape our childhood and Coventry's melancholy and stiff mood pervaded my soul.'
These days, it pervades some of his lyrics too, as well as the 'nihilistic disposition' (if not the sound) of Coventry band The Specials. 'There are a lot of emotionless stares in Coventry, faces of disdain or disappointment or emptiness.'
There's nothing emotionless or empty about Behaviour. Instead, there's a dichotomy between cynicism and romance, and a 'take it or leave it' confrontation that runs through the album — 'but I'm discomfited by the fact that you might leave,' he says, 'because I really want you to take it.' And in contrast to some of the behaviors displayed by the characters in the songs — insecurity, immaturity, debauchery — there exists a refined, focused sensibility that binds the tracks together and speaks volumes about the kind of musical future Pickard sees for himself. 'The album is very purposeful,' he says. 'I'm not chancing it musically.'
About Daniel Pickard
Pickard started working on Behaviour during the first Covid lockdown in 2020 while isolating with his family in Coventry. 'The benefit of that time for artists was that we were able to contact musicians like Owen Pallett and Michael Stein who were perhaps not otherwise engaged, because of what was going on,' he says. He engaged the services of co-producer Max Prior, and recorded vocals with Grammy-winning mixer Eduardo De La Paz at Toast, the Kensal Rise studio of producer Craig Silvey (Baxter Dury, Jarvis Cocker), and recorded the drums in West Hampstead's Hoxa HQ studio with Silvey's assistant Dani Spragg, who also engineered the record. Synths flew in from composer Alex Ball in Bristol, Carlos Trilha Müller in Brazil, and Stein in Texas. Lead single Heartbeats the Flaw features vocals from French artist Mahault. Antoine Chabert (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christine and the Queens, Daft Punk) mastered the album in Paris — another fit, given Behaviour wears its French influences on its sleeve, from the nonchalant dandy leanings of Sébastien Tellier, to Daft Punk, L'Impératrice, Ellie et Jacno, and producer SebastiAn. Elements of Italo disco worked their way into the songs too, as well as a film score sensibility.
Pickard picked up the guitar at 16, but it wasn't until he moved to London for university — living above the Big Red pub on Holloway Road in a halls of residence that used to be a Young Offenders Institute — that he started writing: pen to paper, chords to songs. He then started playing, first at an open mic night, then in venues across London and abroad. In 2013 he formed Half Loon alongside Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton. They released an EP, played shows and festivals, and toured, before eventually disbanding in 2017. 'We were really good but we weren't productive enough,' says Pickard.
Tracklist
01 First Past the Pose
02 Nominee
03 Catastrophe
04 Heartbeats the Flaw
05 Interlude
06 São Paulo
07 MD is a Pervert
08 Room Service
09 A Bum Suspected of Murder
10 Love on a Lie
Photo Credit: Axel Gillot | Download hi-res image
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