Marie Davidson

Marie Davidson has always gone against the grain. The French-Canadian producer’s

first four albums established her as a transgressive force in dance music, with her 2014

debut Perte d'identité (Loss of identity) laying the foundations of organic electronics and

introspective storytelling that she would continue to build upon. Each release probed her

“dualistic” relationship to nightlife while becoming increasingly saturated in its

abundance of sounds, from Detroit techno to Italo disco, finally reaching a fever pitch on

2018’s Polaris Music Prize-nominated Working Class Woman. Putting the pitfalls of club

culture and her own fractured identity under a withering satirical lens, Working Class

Woman doesn’t wrestle with the existential as much as fling it around the dancefloor.

Four years and a pandemic later, Davidson’s sixth studio album, City of Clowns, marks

a return to the club – but not as you know it. The techno thump and scathing spoken-

word delivery of Working Class Woman resurface at points, but the pop structures and

melodic sensibilities of Renegade Breakdown also remain. It’s a “strange” sonic blend

even by Davidson’s own standards. “It’s definitely linking back to what I was doing pre-

pandemic, but with a bit of an evolution,” she says. “I didn't want to just repeat myself.”

The sound and the spirit of the album are shaped, too, by the fact that Davidson has a

new antagonist. This time it’s not club culture that’s coming for her sense of self, it’s Big

Tech.