Nouvelle Vague

A phone call about Joy Division

In 2003 the producer Marc Collin rang the guitarist and producer Olivier Libaux with one idea: record "Love Will Tear Us Apart" as a bossa nova. Libaux, born in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 5 May 1964, had come up through Les Objets, the group he co-founded with Jérôme Rousseaux in 1989 and which released two albums on Sony; Michel Gondry directed videos for them. The pair's new name carried three meanings at once — nouvelle vague is French for new wave, the phrase belongs to the 1960s French cinema movement, and bossa nova translates from Portuguese along the same lines. The joke was the thesis.

What turned a gag into a method was the casting rule. Collin and Libaux hired young, mostly French female singers and, wherever possible, chose vocalists who had never heard the originals. The singers were handed a lyric sheet and an arrangement rather than a reference recording, which meant nobody was doing an impression of Ian Curtis or Siouxsie Sioux. The self-titled debut, built from eight such voices, appeared in 2004 on Peacefrog and reached number 69 in France, where it spent 39 weeks inside the top 200 — a slow burn rather than a hit, and one that kept selling.

Twenty years of other people's songs

Bande à Part followed in 2006 and travelled further than the debut, reaching number 23 in France, 15 in Germany, eight in Portugal and 79 in the UK. By then the formula had a second engine: the band had become a finishing school for singers. Camille, Mélanie Pain, Phoebe Killdeer, Nadéah Miranda and Élodie Frégé all passed through and went on to solo careers, and Killdeer's "Fade Out Lines" became an international hit once The Avener remixed it.

The third album, 3 (2009), tested whether the conceit could survive contact with the people who wrote the songs. Martin Gore, Ian McCulloch, Terry Hall and Barry Adamson all took part. Couleurs sur Paris in 2010 turned the formula inward, remaking French-language material with guests including Vanessa Paradis and Olivia Ruiz, and arrived alongside a Best Of. Critical interest thinned after that and the group went quiet for several years, returning in 2016 with I Could Be Happy and the Athol Brose EP. Collin also ran the idea on a parallel track under his own name with Hollywood, mon amour (2008), which applied the same treatment to 1980s film songs.

Carrying on without Libaux

Libaux died on 29 September 2021, aged 57. Beyond Nouvelle Vague he had produced Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age in 2013, a set of female-sung reworkings made with Josh Homme's blessing — proof that the reinterpretation instinct was his as much as the band's.

Collin kept the project running. Should I Stay or Should I Go?, released in early 2024 to mark twenty years, brought in new vocalists and ranged across Depeche Mode, Dead or Alive, Yazoo, Bauhaus, ABC, Tears for Fears, The Clash, Billy Idol, The Associates, Duran Duran, Blondie and The Smiths. Reviews split along predictable lines. Louder Than War called it startlingly brilliant and read it as the band's most boundary-expanding record; Cover Me judged it uneven but still one of the more enjoyable albums of their career, singling out the haunted quality of "People Are People" and "She's in Parties" and finding the faster title track harder to defend. The anniversary was marked onstage as well, including a show at Liverpool's Cavern Club in February 2024.

A date with Depeche Mode

The current record is the first Nouvelle Vague album built entirely from one band's catalogue. A Date with Depeche Mode is due on 30 October 2026 through Kwaidan Records and [PIAS], on LP and CD, and collects 13 reworkings recorded between Rio de Janeiro and Paris with Brazilian musicians. It is less of a leap than it looks: Martin Gore had already sung on 3, and "People Are People" and "Just Can't Get Enough" have been fixtures of the live set for years.

The guest list runs to Skye Edwards of Morcheeba and Phoebe Killdeer, who take two tracks each, plus Flavia Coelho, Mélanie Pain and Beth Hirsch. Three singles have arrived ahead of the album: "Enjoy the Silence", sung by Edwards with Larry Love of Alabama 3; "Never Let Me Down Again"; and "Only When I Lose Myself", issued on 27 August 2026. The tracklist also takes in "Personal Jesus" and "Stripped".

The album feeds straight into a 13-date UK tour under the same title in March 2027, opening in Stratford-upon-Avon on 4 March and closing in Edinburgh on 20 March, with KOKO in London on 5 March and Band on the Wall in Manchester on 6 March. Tickets went on sale on 5 June 2026.

Where the band stands in September 2026

The diary is busy and deliberately mid-sized. A show at Paradiso in Amsterdam on 26 September 2026 is followed immediately by an Australian run — The Tivoli in Brisbane on 1 October, 170 Russell in Melbourne on 2 October and the Metro Theatre in Sydney on 3 October — then Sala Villanos in Madrid on 20 November and Klub Proxima in Warsaw on 30 January 2027. After the UK dates come French shows in Paris and Limoges in April 2027 and Strasbourg in May. Roughly 18 concerts across six countries are listed.

Nobody is pretending this is anything other than a covers band, and the band least of all. The line KOKO used to bill its November 2025 show, taken from The Times, put the case at its plainest: twenty years on, it still works. What has changed since Libaux's death is that the studio project and the touring one have drifted apart — the records now carry famous guests, while the stage is held by singers most of the audience will not have heard of until the lights go down.