Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul return with a dance record about the overwhelm

The baby is in the club. "Googoo Gaga" is a dance track described as a meditation on motherhood, and it marks the first Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul release since their 2022 debut album Topical Dancer. The Belgian duo created it as they both became parents.

Up to now, Topical Dancer was the entirety of the catalogue, and four years is a long quiet stretch to keep a duo in memory. This single is the first proof of what the gap yielded, and the answer is not a ballad.

It comes with a video directed by Lennert Madou, inspired by the Flemish folklore figure De Mammelokker. Their statement says it was created as they became parents, and that it concerns feeling drained, the self-sacrifice, the overwhelm, and embracing all of it. They expressed the same idea better in one line: "It takes a village, and yet you’re doing it alone."

The sound resembles a strobe: pulsing, high-energy dance music, art pop in spirit and club in tempo. The topic is exhaustion. The tempo is not.

It'll connect with anybody who played Topical Dancer to death, and with anyone seeking a floor record that comes with a subject attached. It's a parent's song, created by two people in the thick of it, and it doesn't ask for sympathy.

What doesn't work is its scale. A single track holds four years of expectation, and the weight falls on one idea beyond what one idea can bear.

A 3.5, then. Fine, and limited only by how little one single is permitted to demonstrate. Play it late, once the day has already taken its toll, and the beat does the talking.

Hear it