We thought we knew her inside out, and yet she manages to surprise us. With her fifth album "La Vitesse," Izïa delivers a comeback that was anything but certain, as delightful for us as it is redemptive for her.

Let's rewind: March 16, 2020, when a shocked France learns from the lips of its President that it must either confine or perish, Izïa is embarking on the grand tour of her album "Citadelle." Neither critical acclaim nor heaps of love from her audience can change the course of events -curtains close, for everyone, and for a long time. She locks herself in, hopes shattered, breath held, and heart bruised. It's precisely to this heart that she speaks in the first single.

Listening to "Mon Coeur," one understands that doubts or limits have no place inthis new chapter of Izïa's career. She embraces her penchant for pop, not incompatible with guitars and edgy beats, nor with celebrating her strength and the desire to fight.

The album "La Vitesse" comes about as a surprise at the Frette studios where Izïa enters in the spring of 2021 "for 4-5 days with Bastien (Burger, her co-composer, producer, indispensable partner), without having written anything, with just the desire to see if the music would come back." They end up staying there all summer, caught up in "a whirlwind of creation, idyllic and intuitive, everything was flowing, simple, as if these songs had been waiting for us there forever."

"La Vitesse," the title track of the album, through which fans of feverish guitar solos will find themselves unexpectedly asking for more autotune, is evidence of these moments of creativity driven by the euphoria of being in the right place at the right time: "Often I would say to myself that I felt at La Frette what my father (Jacques Higelin, who passed away in2018, a few months before Izïa became a mother) had experienced at Château d'Hérouville, this mystical connection with a perfect place... It's reassuring to know that there is a place that has such an effect on me, I know that if I go back there, something will always happen."

Beyond the pleasure and ease of working in these places, Izïaeven attributes magical powers to them: "One evening on the terrace, I was looking at the sky thinking about my father, I heard Bastien playing a tune on the piano... I joined him in the studio, I started singing... the song 'Le Remède' came suddenly... We were so moved when Bastien admitted to me that he too was thinking about dad: it was he who whispered this song to us, no doubt about it."

For "Pura Vida," the same suddenness, the same happy surprise of feeling notes and words flow freely, but a changeof scenery: as in the lyrics, it's in the midst of the jungle that Izïa started humming the chorus, while treating herself to a morale-boosting break in Costa Rica.

While some might have expected her to tackle societal themes like feminism, on this new album, Izïa explores the intimate: "It's the freedom that the album exudes that is political. I am a woman who makes her music with sincerity and complete independence, there's no need to underline it with a particular text." "Etoile Noire" expresses her desire to move forward and not dwell on her mistakes, "Folle" allows her to proclaim an absolute right to live her life with all the passion in the world, and the aptly named opening track "Royale" proves that her lyrics are as embodied and moving as ever. Nevertheless, Izïa often attributes the poetry of her lyrics to her instinct and compares them to prayers for herself and for those who listen to them. Since writing took place simultaneously with composition and production, she could envision her voice as an instrument, just like a guitar or a synth.

With "La Vitesse," Izïa embraces being a hard worker and discovers the pleasure of pushing each production idea, each narrative track, to the fullest. The desire is inexhaustible, and the resulting joy is a gift: "It took me five albums to discover how I like to make music. 'La Vitesse' is the synthesis of all the singers I have been since the beginning. Life is short but the road is long, so I stop questioning everything, I listen to myself, and I trust myself.”

Izïa has become herself, and she is free, absolutely.

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