Hervé releases his third album this Friday, “Adrénaline”. A record that he promoted on social networks with a lot of originality, fantasy and energy. He tells BFMTV behind the scenes.
Hervé jumps on beds at Litrimarché, in the Kerpont industrial zone near Lorient. Hervé sings in boots among the cows, joins a tea dance, signs albums in a PMU opposite the factory where his vinyls are made… Exploring the singer’s Instagram account, which comes out this Friday his third album Adrenalinereveals some offbeat sequences in the form of a happening, full of humor and tenderness.
“Funny images” that Hervé uses to announce the songs on the album. “I like to put a few extracts before the release of the record, so that people know a little bit of what to expect,” he explains to BFMTV.com.
“Bullshit ideas”
Videos shot “instinctively”, often based on “stupid ideas”, and which draw a delicate portrait of the singer, revealed in 2020 with his first album Hyper. The portrait of an artist with communicative energy, a guy “like everyone else”, title of the third track of the album.
However, there is no question of flooding social networks with everyday sequences or “super boring stuff with beautiful typography” to promote his music. The videos that he makes with his family and his team, Hervé distils them sparingly on social networks.
The idea is to “offer people something that sticks.” “I don’t post 150 stories a day, it’s a format that I don’t like. I will never say what I ate this lunch, it’s something that doesn’t interest me. On the other hand, tell me ‘ah well go ahead, I’m in England, go ahead let’s make a video, what if we went to Buckingham to propose the album to the king, my friend films it, it shoots, and go ahead, we’ll post it .”
“I want it all to be like the album, simple and instinctive, full of adrenaline, because you have to go fast. But we don’t calculate, there’s no marketing plan.”
“I’m not in ‘Striptease'”
When some open pop-up restaurants, like the rapper SCH or broadcast cryptic messages like PNL, Hervé invites himself to a dance hall for seniors. The sequence in the tea dance next to his mother’s house, the Balajo in Lanester, was born like that, to introduce a piece Like everyone. We see Hervé playing the DJ.
“When I got there, at first, they didn’t put it back on at all, so they weren’t hot at all. I negotiated for a good hour, so I could come back at snack time. Finally, I don’t know how it happened, he said go ahead.”
Without mockery or pretension, Hervé exchanges and jokes with the people he meets, and who very often do not know him.
“I’m not in Striptease. It’s people who look like me, with whom I feel good.”
Social networks, “the worst thing that has happened and the best”, also promote a form of proximity with the public, and allow them to show that they have remained “normal”. “I took a Victoire de la Musique for the first album (editor’s note in 2021, the prize for male revelation), but it’s nothing. It’s quiet, let’s calm down.”
This wacky tone, this assumed taste for bad taste, without ever taking himself seriously, Hervé draws it from the other side of the channel, from artists “like the Idles, the Sleaford Mods“.
“In England, no one thinks twice, no one talks about it. We know that they are songwriters, producers, they often have their label. We know that they are sincere in the music, in the lyrics, often They are politically engaged, they are serious people, but in fact the guys are super cool, super nice, super humble.”
“A gateway to understanding a little madness”
The lightness and second degree that emerge from its promo also fit better with the subject of this album, after a second album, Interior life, in 2023, “hyper intimate, hyper heavy”. “It wasn’t easy for me to express myself on the networks without it being tearful or too hard for me. (Today) I’m in a different form, that allows me to express myself on this record a a little easier.”
And Hervé’s audience agrees. “This video sums up why I adore you,” wrote one follower on Instagram. “But I’m such a fan of your ideas,” adds another. “Never seen it before!! It’s a wonderful idea and the music is great, well done to you”, agrees a third fan. The football jerseys found and flocked with the name of the album sold like hot cakes.
If he vaguely fears being known less for his music than for his videos, Hervé quickly brushes aside this concern.
“If I’m known for promotional elements – that word is awful – for the stupid little videos that I put on the networks which I use to tell everyone ‘there’s an album coming out’, in so much the better. If it allows you to listen to the pieces, so much the better. It’s a gateway to understanding the madness a little.
And then his videos are emulated, to the point of being imitated by other artists. “We get all our ideas stolen,” he laughs. “Slightly better known people who copy. There are starting to be some. A singer with cows, ways of announcing albums. That’s the game, I’m not worshipping.”
