Stream Petit Biscuit’s soaring, cinematic debut album, ‘Presence’

by: Ryan Castillo Nov 10, 2017

Rising star Petit Biscuit has proven his talents for music production are developed well beyond his years. Classically trained in the cello since the age of five, Mehdi Benjelloun burst onto the dance music scene with his monumental remix of ODESZA‘s “Memories That You Call,” drawing comparisons of his cinematic sound design with that of the Seattle-based duo. The promising young producer, hailing from France, would soon catapult himself to notoriety at the mere age of 15 with his 5-track self-titled EP, wherein the project’s leading single, “Sunset Lover,” reached an unprecedented 400 million streams worldwide.

The multi-talented musician now celebrates his 18th birthday with the release of a genre-blending debut album that is every bit as warm and inviting as it is vulnerable and exposed. Presence offers sunny, progressive chord structures and colorful, polished mixing flanked by electronic touches and a furtive vocality that both chills and arouses. From the LP’s first track, “Creation Comes Alive,” featuring SONIA, to its instrumental closing title, “The End,” which utilizes the same shimmering synth pattern, the entire work becomes an evocative story book of pain and resilience for which one can use a lens into — quite literally — viewing an emotion.

Arguably the stand out track of the LP is “Forever Being,” which mirrors an ODESZA-built soundscape with chiming key chords, soaring vocal chops, complex half-/double-time drum work, and nostalgic phonographic movie quotes on the front and tail ends. The LP’s most astounding fact: Petit Biscuit wrote, produced, and mixed Presence over the course of the last year, finding time between high school exams and sold-out tours across the US, Europe, and beyond.