After Chris of Christine and the Queens’ mother died, the French alt-pop star began to notice red cars everywhere—and almost always in moments of internal shift. Those sightings give context to the title of his third album, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), and inspired the name and artistic persona he would embrace thereafter. “For me, the red car was a way to encourage my spirit to lift a bit higher when I was a bit desperate,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every record is a deep, deep wave of transformation both inwards and outwards. I feel actually braver than before, a bit terrified, but in a true gutsy way.” Redcar—the follow-up to 2018’s Chris—presents the artist’s most thrilling transformation to date. It’s also the most daring Christine and the Queens album so far: a high-concept collection of roof-raising ’80s synth-pop and funk inspired by artists such as The Cure and Fad Gadget. Sung almost entirely in French, it’s theatrical (the propulsive, operatic “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut”), spooky (“La chanson du chevalier”), shimmering, sensual, and frequently otherworldly, with electrifying guitar solos and R&B along the way. And yet, for all its ’80s hallmarks—drum machines, dazzling synths, songs cloaked in reverb (a throwback, too, to 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine)—the album was crafted with a rock ’n’ roll spirit in mind. Moved by the spontaneous artistic process of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, Chris wrote, recorded, and produced this album alone at home within just two weeks, spending no more than an hour on each song. The result is an album that feels epic and alive, and often like an outpouring, as an artist who has always committed to evolving in front of us moves through change. After the farewell—to a lover or a past self—of album opener “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” these songs explore intimacy, the search for meaning and connection (including the Sylvester-referencing “Looking for love”), and stepping into your true self. Loss, too, colors the album, but on “rien dire”—one of the album’s most powerful songs, and as much of a gut-punch as 2020’s “People, I’ve been sad”—Redcar reaches a hopeful conclusion: Love, and the people we love, are never truly gone. “I think true love is a conversation that never is interrupted, and by ‘never’ I mean not even by death,” he says. “That’s my current faith I have right now. That song is a conversation I have with someone who is not there anymore.”